The Wikidata project was kicked off around a year ago by the German chapter of Wikimedia, which is still steering its gradual development. For Wikipedia, the advantage is simple and powerful — if there’s a central, machine-readable source for facts, such as the population of a city, then any update to that data can be instantly reflected across all the articles in which the facts are included.

To posit a morbid example: a singer may have dozens or even hundreds of language versions of her Wikipedia entry and, if she were to die, the addition of a date of death to the Wikidata database would immediately propagate across all those versions, with no need to manually update each one (yes, I can also see how this might go horribly wrong).

Indeed, Wikidata is now being used as a common data source for all 286 Wikipedia language versions. Here’s the under-development “item” page for Russia, if you want to see what Wikidata looks like in practise.

But the really interesting thing with Wikidata is that it’s not just for Wikipedia – although it’s worth remembering that its API is still under development, the database can be used by anyone as it is published under a Creative Commons 0 public domain dedication. Here’s how Wikidata project director Denny Vrandečić put it in a statement:

“It is the goal of Wikidata to collect the world’s complex knowledge in a structured manner so that anybody can benefit from it, whether that’s readers of Wikipedia who are able to be up to date about certain facts or engineers who can use this data to create new products that improve the way we access knowledge.”

There are already some pretty cool (if bare-bones) examples of what people can do with Wikidata. One is GeniaWiki, which is trying to map the family relationships between famous people (the first and so far only example is that of the Bach family), while a Tree of Life project is trying to put together a viable, Wikidata-based “taxonomy of all life”.

It’s worth noting that the initial funding for Wikidata’s development has come from Google, the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, and the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence. Ultimately, Wikidata is precisely the sort of venture that is needed to feed the nascent semantic web and AI movement.

It’s far from the only venture in this space – I’d also recommend keeping a close eye on Google’s Knowledge Graph, which powers Google Now, and Wolfram|Alpha, which partly powers Siri – but all these (often intertwined) projects are essentially trying to do the same thing: to turn facts into something that machines can understand.

And that, in conjunction with advances in natural language processing and machine learning, will ultimately help us converse with machines. These are the building blocks of artificial intelligence and the future of search, and Wikidata’s very permissive license should act as an open invitation to anyone dabbling in this space.

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So why did it take Wikipedia so long to get videos on its site? It faced a number of unique challenges: First of all, Wikipedia doesn’t rely on outside hosting for any of its media, which means that it needs a robust video hosting infrastructure.

But the site’s commitment to open codecs and standards has also slowed down its adoption of video. Wikimedia originally only used Ogg Theora-encoded videos, which significantly limited its reach. The video codec was open source, but had limited support. The open sourcing of WebM through Google in 2010 offered a more widely supported alternative: Firefox, Chrome and Opera all are capable of natively playing WebM-encoded video content, and mobile devices are starting to embrace WebM as well.

The final challenge may be more of a cultural nature, and we will have to wait and see whether a new video player will really be able to address it. Wikipedia has been largely text-based, with a complex collaborative editing process and a large community that helps to maintain the site. Video on the other hand is much harder to edit in the way users can edit a text entry on Wikipedia. The Wikimedia Foundation wants to use collaborative video editing tools developed by Kaltura to help bridge that gap. From the announcement blog post for the new video player:

“On the internet, video is a static medium: it rarely changes once uploaded. In contrast, the success of Wikipedia relies on numerous volunteers constantly editing and improving each other’s contributions. Appropriate tools will hopefully reduce this dissonance, like Kaltura’s sequencer, which empowers users to remix videos directly online. Successfully translating its radically collaborative nature to multimedia content will be critical to Wikipedia’s transition into the age of video.”

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After giving a kind of whirlwind tour of the open-source movement in his talk, including the rise of Linux, Shirky devoted much of his discussion to Github — a kind of crowdsourced platform for maintaining code that Linux creator Linus Torvalds also created, which allows anyone to edit, to “fork” or create their own version, and to track the changes that others make. It’s not a big stretch to get from that idea to the idea of crowdsourcing legislation, which is what Shirky seems to have in mind, and there have already been some attempts at doing this via Github: for example, a German software developer has uploaded all of Germany’s laws to the platform so that citizens can recommend and track changes.

It’s an intriguing idea: that a simple software platform aimed at collaboration could change the way legislation is developed and implemented, much like the process that powers Wikipedia has created a crowdsourced encyclopedia that evolves and changes over time. But is it realistic? There were plenty of skeptics who said Wikipedia would never succeed, and yet it has an excellent track record when it comes to reliability, despite some hiccups in the process, such as the recent incident involving author Philip Roth. That said, however, there are also plenty of critics who believe that the “cabal” of editors who control the crowd-powered encyclopedia have too much authority.

Of course, some would argue that we’re already in that kind of situation with most governments anyway, and therefore Github couldn’t make things any worse. And Shirky is not the only one to make this argument: developer Abe Voelker has proposed a “Github for laws” that would take exactly the same approach to crafting and crowdsourcing legislation. There have also been some initial experiments with similar ideas — including Iceland’s new constitution and similar types of project in Finland and Ireland — which shows that others are also open to the concept.

One of the problems with applying a technical solution like Github to a massive cultural and political process like government, however, is that creating laws — even small ones — is very different from changing a piece of code so that Linux can duplicate Windows-style typefaces, or changing the Wikipedia entry on George Bush. And if even those kinds of prosaic examples can lead to the equivalent of a Linux or Wikipedia holy war, which in many cases they have, what hope do we have that politicians can actually use a similar process to change the way that government works? As Shirky suggests in his talk, there’s also a pretty entrenched bureaucracy that has become part of most governments and likely has no interest in relinquishing that control to the crowd.

In his book “Here Comes Everybody,” Shirky described the potentially massive impact of crowdsourcing and crowd-powered social change, and his admiration of Github seems to be part of an attempt to find tools that will help us deal with the tidal wave of human-driven collaboration. This is something we clearly need, so it’s worthwhile to start looking at solutions — and while Github may not be the answer, at this point just about anything is probably worth a shot.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr user Fabio Venni

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If there’s a report detailing Leetaru’s findings, I haven’t been able to find it, but even this snippet from the project’s Facebook page is pretty insightful:

From this analysis, Wikipedia is seen to have four periods of growth in its historical coverage: 1001-1500 (Middle Ages), 1501-1729 (Early Modern Period), 1730-2003 (Age of Enlightenment), 2004-2011 (Wikipedia Era) and its continued growth appears to be focused on enhancing its coverage of historical events, rather than increased documenting of the present. The average tone of Wikipedia’s coverage of each year closely matches major global events, with the most negative period in the last 1,000 years being the American Civil War, followed by World War II. The analysis also shows that the “copyright gap” that blanks out most of the twentieth century in digitized print collections is not a problem with Wikipedia where there is steady exponential growth in it’s coverage from 1924 to today.

Leetaru also visualized the findings and created a couple of 30-second videos showing Wikipedia coverage and sentiment over time and geopgraphy. His visualizations (like the one above mapping “[e]very year from 1000 AD to 2012 referenced in Wikipedia plotted and cross referenced when mentioned in the same article”) are beautiful as works of art, although one can’t readily decipher who the influential people, organizations and years are.

Still, the project is a valuable reminder of just how far we’ve come in terms of data-analysis techniques and the computing power necessary to run them. This is why the idea of big data is so popular, even if the possibilities haven’t been fully realized yet. Analyses that would have taken weeks or days now take hours, minutes or seconds, which means anyone with the right data and the right gear can learn a heck of a lot if they can keeping coming up with good questions.

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The town-wide availability of Wi-Fi fits in well with Wikipedia because it makes the content and knowledge freely accessible; people won’t have to supply their own mobile broadband and free QR code reader apps are a dime a dozen for most handsets. Not every interesting object in Monmouth will have a large plaque, simply because some items are small. Here’s what visitors should be looking according to (surprise!)… Wikipedia:

• Larger ceramic or metal plaques for places exposed to the elements for articles specific to Monmouth.
• Smaller plastic, ceramic or metal plaques for labelling objects non specific to Monmouth, e.g. for use in the Flora and Fauna guide.
• Labels for use inside buildings, e.g. for objects in museums.
• Glass stickers in the windows of shops to give information on their professions
• In addition there will be information posters, signs, notice boards and leaflets to help people contribute and stay informed.

The viewable information in Monmouthpedia, as the project is dubbed, will grow over time as local residents and others contribute more data, stories, images and such. And it doesn’t matter what language you speak in order to understand your tour of Monmouth: Wikipedia entries will appear in the native language your handset is configured for.

Monmouthpedia sounds like it has something to offer everyone, but archeologist fans ought to be especially interested:  The Council for British Archaeology designated Monmouth the seventh best town for archaeology in Britain. Who’d have thought that free Wi-Fi and a cell phone would allow for an immersive archeological experience followed shortly by a pint of local ale with history of the bar?

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The “crowdsourced” question-and-answer site Quora raised more than a few eyebrows on Monday when it closed a new $50-million round of financing that values the fledgling company at $400 million, despite a conspicuous lack of scale when it comes to users. Is this just another example of the bubble-style funding rounds that have made Instagram and Pinterest the talk of the VC business, or a sign of how much power the “Facebook mafia” has in Silicon Valley? Or is Quora really onto something that could potentially turn into a multibillion-dollar idea?

Quora has more or less admitted that it doesn’t really need the $50 million it just finished raising, at least not yet. Co-founder Adam D’Angelo said (on Quora, of course) that more than half of the Series A funding round of $11 million the startup raised in 2010 is still sitting in the bank, unused. So why raise that much money at all? As Om has noted, one reason Quora did so is simply that it could — there was apparently plenty of interest, and the company wound up with financing from original Facebook investor Peter Thiel, among others.

Raising money is easy for Quora, so why not do it?

This is the startup version of the old adage “make hay while the sun shines,” and when two of your co-founders are Facebook alumni — Adam D’Angelo was the chief technology officer of the social network, and Charlie Cheever oversaw the development of Facebook’s “open graph” platform — there is plenty of hay to be made, especially since both founders are likely to become extremely wealthy when Facebook goes public (more than a third of the $50 million that Quora raised reportedly came from D’Angelo himself). More than anything, VCs love to give money to people who don’t need it.

D’Angelo has said that one of the reasons Quora raised the funding is so that it would have more “runway,” or room to prove itself and its concept before it has to start making money. And it’s clear, based on interviews with the founders, that the company sees what it is building as a potentially world-changing idea. Both seem devoted to it not because they believe it will be easy to flip or sell for billions of dollars (which they don’t really need), but because they think there is an interesting problem worth solving. As Cheever told me in 2010:

We’re not really focused on making money right now. I think if we can solve the problem we are trying to solve, we will find a way to make money.

In a nutshell, that problem is how to aggregate or crowdsource expertise on a wide variety of topics efficiently, and it’s one that any number of startups and services have tried to tackle, all the way from Yahoo Answers and Ask.com to Formspring, Reddit and Stack Exchange. And most have failed: Yahoo Answers and others have degenerated into cesspools of uselessness and spam, while companies like Aardvark disappeared inside Google and other acquirers, never to be seen again. Facebook launched its own Questions service in 2010, but there’s no sign that many people are using it much.

Among those who have tried to attack the problem from a different angle are sites like Demand Media’s eHow, which pays writers to come up with articles that contain some kind of expertise about a topic. Interestingly enough, eHow was built by Josh Hannah — who bought it in 2004 and built it into a major player before selling it to Demand Media, and is also an investor in an open-source spinoff called WikiHow. Hannah, now a partner with the venture-capital fund Matrix Partners, is an investor in Quora’s latest financing round.

Wikipedia is the model, but can Quora mimic its success?

Despite all the failures, there is one obvious example of a successful crowdsourced knowledge base, used by hundreds of millions of web surfers daily: Wikipedia. More than a decade after it was originally launched, the site is one of the top 10 most-visited web destinations on the Internet with 15 billion pageviews per month. And even more unlikely, Wikipedia has accomplished this feat without raising any venture-capital funding whatsoever, relying solely on donations and charitable funding.

The two sites have somewhat different approaches: Wikipedia asks users to contribute links and verified facts to articles that are designed to be a one-stop source of information about a topic — contributors are explicitly not allowed to state opinions based on their personal knowledge. Quora, however, tries to get those with knowledge to answer questions about specific topics, and then the community gets to vote on which answer they like best. Both sites have strict rules about what kinds of content can be posted, to avoid the Yahoo Answers problem. As a user of the site, I’ve found the quality of the answers to be consistently pretty high.

One of the main things that has helped Wikipedia grow as quickly as it has is the fact that it ranks extremely highly in Google search results, since it is seen by the search giant as an unbiased source of factual information. Given that kind of traffic, Wikipedia could easily generate hundreds of millions of dollars in advertising revenues if it added some innocuous banner advertisements to its pages (something it refuses to consider). And some Quora supporters believe that results from the site could benefit from the same phenomenon, especially as Google looks for more social signals about information.

So the ingredients of a compelling story are there: founders who have their eye on a big vision, who aren’t motivated solely by a quick flip for cash, and who are trying to build a Wikipedia-style global knowledge database powered by individual input from experts. The fact that Quora’s usage numbers seem a little lackluster is the only fly in the ointment for believers — but then, there was a time when Wikipedia wasn’t really a household name either.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr user Mark Strozier

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There are plenty of warning signs about the ongoing disruption in the media industry, and everyone is looking for someone to blame. But when it comes to their journalistic competition, many traditional outlets still seem to look primarily at other media players such as the Huffington Post, Buzzfeed or Politico. As information architect and web developer Stijn Debrouwere notes in a smart post about the evolution of media, however, the reality is that much of what we find competing with journalism in the digital world are things we barely even recognize as journalism. How the industry adapts to that change will be the real challenge.

Debrouwere says that when he thinks about the changes in journalism, he’s not thinking about “digital first or about blogging or about data journalism or the mobile web or the curation craze,” or any of the other aspects of democratized distribution and the social web, such as citizen journalism — all of which he notes have had a huge impact. Instead, he says we should be looking at the things that are actually replacing traditional sources of journalism in our day-to-day consumption habits.

Sites like Wikipedia and Reddit are replacing some aspects of journalism

In this category, Debrouwere mentions services such as Netflix and Amazon, as well as Spotify and Rdio — all of which feature recommendation engines, and in many cases social aspects that to some extent replace reading record reviews or concert reviews in a newspaper. Not only is there less clutter, he says, but you can listen to or watch the content right away. Other sites offer topic-specific content that is much deeper and richer than any general-interest newspaper could hope to be on a subject. And then there are sites like Reddit and Quora and Wikipedia:

Reddit’s I Am A board, with threads like “I am an astronaut, ask me anything” and “I am an Australian nightclub bouncer, ask me anything,” looks like any other internet forum, but it is also what interviews and profiles can look like in the 21st century. Wikipedia has, for pretty much everyone, replaced news organizations as the place where you go to get in-depth information about anything that didn’t happen today.

Debrouwere’s point about Reddit was reinforced during a recent “Ask me anything” discussion the site did with Paul Krugman, the Nobel Prize-winning economist and columnist for the New York Times. Although there were some typically light-hearted and irreverent questions from Reddit users, it was as illuminating an interview about Krugman’s views as I have read in any magazine or newspaper. David Weinberger, a fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, has also written about Reddit as a prototype for a different kind of journalism.

Is what Reddit does journalism? Is what Wikipedia does or Quora does journalism? These might be the kinds of questions that journalists like to get wrapped up in, but people looking for information probably aren’t as interested in splitting semantic hairs. All they know is whether it’s useful or not (EveryBlock founder Adrian Holovaty had an excellent response several years ago when someone asked him “Is data journalism?”).

Readers aren’t interested in debates about the nature of journalism

You can see this phenomenon in action whenever something new comes along that impinges on media consumption in some way, including Twitter. In just the past couple of years, the service has transformed itself from a harmless tool for wasting time into a real-time global newswire, but it wasn’t that long ago that critics were asking whether posting things to Twitter qualified as journalism. Before that, it was the question of “bloggers vs. journalists,” an issue that got debated endlessly. But I think Debrouwere is right when he says that this misses the point:

[Neither] YouTube nor Facebook or any of these other companies aim to be an alternative to journalism and much of what they facilitate or do doesn’t look like journalism at all. A good chunk of it contains written or spoken words, but sometimes not even that. It’s not journalism. But you’d be naive if you thought their services aren’t often consumed instead of news.

Debrouwere’s post is entitled “Fungible,” a term economists use to refer to commodities that are effectively interchangeable. Most journalists would probably rather not think of what they produce as being “fungible.” They would prefer to think of it as being unique, but that is rarely the case. As economists love to point out, your competition isn’t the product that is better, it’s the one that is good enough. And as media-studies professor Nikki Usher noted in a recent post at the Nieman Journalism Lab, newspapers may be convinced that everyone still wants and needs them — but they could be mistaken.

So what can traditional media entities do in this environment? Debrouwere has some suggestions, including focusing more on storytelling and personality “because those things are irreplaceable,” as well as “writing to peoples’ passion” and trying to be more entertaining in the same way that sites such as The Awl and Gawker are. But for many traditional journalists, that is going to sound pretty hollow — just as the recent suggestions by Washington Post president Steve Hills about having more slideshows seemed to strike a sour note for many writers there and elsewhere.

In the end, Debrouwere has a harsh question, but it bears thinking about:

Are we trying to get better at something that doesn’t matter anymore? Perhaps we should take the best traditions of journalism and do something entirely new with it. Whatever we are doing now is not working.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr users Denise Chan and See-ming Lee

We’ll be discussing these media issues and much more at paidContent 2012: At The Crossroads on May 23 in NYC. Register today.

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Anyone who grew up with the Encyclopedia Britannica could be forgiven for getting a little misty-eyed about the legendary publication doing away with its printed version after more than two centuries, even if the move seems unsurprising (and more than a little late). But memories of those old, dusty volumes aside, there is no question that the creation of a storehouse of knowledge about the world is far better done via a networked and distributed model like Wikipedia’s than with a centralized and proprietary approach like Britannica’s. As we are finding with journalism and the news business, knowledge building gets better when there are more people involved. The process may be chaotic, but the result is superior.

Like the disappearance of public telephone booths, Britannica’s decision to shut down its printing presses and stop selling its 32-volume sets is one of those signpost moments in the shift from analog to digital content — something that is usually unsurprising when it happens, because by that time it has become obvious to virtually everyone that the world has moved on (so obvious that some thought Britannica stopped printing a long time ago) but is nevertheless worth taking note of. While telephone booths might be nostalgia items for many — particularly Doctor Who fans — for many more people the new world of telecommunications is much better.

Aggregating knowledge via the Web is superior in virtually every way

If you were to suggest now that a printed volume that took years to produce and involved only a small group of contributors (and, at $1,400, cost so much that many families could not afford to buy one) was the best way of distributing knowledge about the world, you might get some agreement from printophiles, but most people would probably laugh. Obviously, searching the Web via Google and finding information through online sources like Wikipedia is the best way of doing that. It is free (absent the cost of Internet access), and the information you get is constantly updated: The Wikipedia entry on the Britannica was edited 51 times within hours of the announcement.

What’s interesting about Britannica’s history is that in many ways it was like the Wikipedia of its day. It has had thousands of contributors over the years, including luminaries like Albert Einstein and Milton Friedman. All that has changed is that the Web has provided us with better tools for getting contributions from more people — both recognized experts and those who haven’t achieved fame but still have knowledge worth sharing — and doing it much faster and much more efficiently.

To me, this is much like the metamorphosis that journalism and the news business have been undergoing since the Web first arrived. Like the Britannica, the old model consisted of specific entities that controlled the distribution of information via their proprietary platforms and did their best to cultivate an air of omniscience in the process, so that consumers (or advertisers) would keep those companies in business. But the democratization of distribution that the Web and social media provide has made everyone a publisher if they wish to be, and a journalist as well (newspapers arguably had their Encyclopedia Britannica moment when the Christian Science Monitor shut down its daily print publication in 2008).

It may not be better for business models, but that too will change

This phenomenon may not be a great thing for the business model that has been built up around these institutions — and plenty of newspapers are still busy fighting a rear-guard action aimed at shoring up their print circulation, just as Britannica fought the digital disruption of its business for years — but it is almost certainly a good thing for journalism. As Professor Jay Rosen has noted many times, journalism gets better when more people do it, and the Web provides the tools for a form of “open journalism” that is arguably much more likely to arrive at the truth than any centralized approach. The same principle lies behind the growing campaign to open up academic publishing so that researchers can collaborate more easily.

Is this kind of process open to vandalism or distortion of the truth? Of course it is. But there has been much written over the years about the flaws in the Britannica as well (including a wonderfully ironic Wikipedia entry about that topic). And errors that appeared in the Britannica’s print edition would linger there not just for hours or weeks as Wikipedia entries do but for years or even decades. How is that a better approach for distributing knowledge? Academic publishing and print journalism arguably suffer from the same flaws, although they may be less serious and/or shorter-lived. And some are already discovering that approaching the business of journalism differently can be a positive thing.

In the end, the death of the Encyclopedia Britannica’s print edition reminds me of the iconic IKEA commercial in which a lamp sits in a curbside garbage heap in the rain, and the voiceover tells us not to be sad because “it has no feelings, and the new one is much better.” We may be nostalgic for the old model of knowledge that the Britannica represents, but that shouldn’t blind us to the fact that the new one is far superior in almost every way.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr user Jeremy Mates

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Android users could easily save a web bookmark for quick access to Wikipedia, but after just a few minutes of using the app, I know this software will be staying on my handset. A few key features are the reason:

• Using a phone’s integrated GPS, the app can search nearby locations for Wikipedia entries.
• A history of your Wikipedia searches. You can get this in a mobile browser, but it would be among the entire browsing history of the device.
• A “save page” button that enables offline reading of a Wikipedia entry (although in my testing, it seems to save every offline page twice).
• A one-button translation option that supports more than 40 languages.

Just like any Android app — or web page for that matter — you can also share a Wikipedia entry through Android’s native sharing features. You are not able to modify a Wikipedia page in the app, but for researching a topic or learning something new, Wikipedia’s new Android app might trump the mobile webpage.

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