Reihan: What's Good for Wikipedia is Good for America

That is a maxim I can get behind.

Seth Roberts reports on a brief conversation with Aaron Swartz, a savvy activist (savvtivist?) who is frustrated by Wikipedia's failings. The basic take-away: how impressive, and how useful, would Wikipedia be if it had leadership as far-sighted and competent as that of Craigslist? (Check out this amazing chart.)

Comments

wikipedia is a lot better for technical science than it is for stuff like current events, especially for obscure entries where people with vested interests and biases are the ones doing most of the editing. thank god no one cares about technical science ;0)

Posted by razib | September 28, 2007 7:06 PM

That chart was amazing, but not exactly fair. After all, getting website views is not the primary business of Time Warner, Newscorp, Microsoft, or Disney...

Posted by RWB | September 28, 2007 9:51 PM

Just keep in mind, that chart is outdated, it is limited to English-language pages, and Craigslist looks much more impressive when ranked by page views than by unique users or Alexa "rank" (a combination of reach and page views). Wikipedia serves about 3 times as many total page views (to probably 10 or 20 times as many individuals) and the Wikimedia Foundation has a paid staff of 12 (though hopefully more soon).

Posted by Sage (User:Ragesoss) | September 28, 2007 10:05 PM