zesamofdepast
Banned
Let's say in this scenario that Wikipedia either never exists or fails to gain the traction to become the massive resource it is today. How would this affect the availability of information on the Internet?
WI: Wikipedia never existed?
- Thread starter zesamofdepast
- Start date
There would be a similar, but much smaller, repository of information, and it wouldn’t be free. The content would be user-generated. Editors would probably be unpaid, and articles would likely contain names and credentials, like Quora. Some payment, likely amounting to less than minimum wage, might exist, but I think that’s unlikely, considering how willing people are to edit for resume points, in the hopes of netting a better real job due to their brand’s online and social media presence. There would be comments. There would be ads. It would be bad. Very bad.
I don’t think traditional encyclopedias like Britannica or even Microsoft Encarta would succeed. Those would have a monthly subscription model, which is great for, say, a simple $6.99/month calculator app, but an encyclopedia would be more profitable with a micro transaction model. Imagine — read all you want about Adolf Hitler for just $3.99 a month, with the content written by one of Ian Kershaw’s students and someone who lived in the same country as Joachim Fest.
I may have exaggerated a little, but I’m confident that a very profitable service would arise in Wikipedia’s place. What would be the bigger revenue stream, though? The access fees, or the data they’d collect?
I don’t think traditional encyclopedias like Britannica or even Microsoft Encarta would succeed. Those would have a monthly subscription model, which is great for, say, a simple $6.99/month calculator app, but an encyclopedia would be more profitable with a micro transaction model. Imagine — read all you want about Adolf Hitler for just $3.99 a month, with the content written by one of Ian Kershaw’s students and someone who lived in the same country as Joachim Fest.
I may have exaggerated a little, but I’m confident that a very profitable service would arise in Wikipedia’s place. What would be the bigger revenue stream, though? The access fees, or the data they’d collect?
Trouble is, once the internet comes about, it's only a matter of (not much) time before Wiki (or something a lot like it) is invented imho, due to the simplicity of the idea-and the demand for convenient information. I suppose it's possible for an Alternate Wiki (not launched by Jimmy Wales) to catch on that doesn't permit all and sundry to be able to alter an article, in which case it may not have the OTL reputation of being unreliable at times.
Maybe if this more tightly regulated Wikipedia isn't quite as popular as OTL, or different platforms are launched with largely the same concept, it may have a bit of competition, perhaps the Google Capeclear service might have had more mileage ITTL-and may have continued in some form until the Social media explosion at least.
Maybe if this more tightly regulated Wikipedia isn't quite as popular as OTL, or different platforms are launched with largely the same concept, it may have a bit of competition, perhaps the Google Capeclear service might have had more mileage ITTL-and may have continued in some form until the Social media explosion at least.
I came to Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy pretty late for my age. I remember reading the part where the author describes the difference between the Guide and the Encyclopedia Galactica. In part:
“In many of the more relaxed civilizations on the Outer Eastern Rim of the Galaxy, the Hitchhiker's Guide has already supplanted the great Encyclopaedia Galactica as the standard repository of all knowledge and wisdom, for though it has many omissions and contains much that is apocryphal, or at least wildly inaccurate, it scores over the older, more pedestrian work in two important respects.
First, it is slightly cheaper; and secondly it has the words DON'T PANIC inscribed in large friendly letters on its cover.”
I think it also goes into detail about the decentralized nature of the editing staff in a big way. Anyway I remember thinking, “Oh, it’s just Douglas Adams conceptualizing wikipedia 25 years ahead of schedule.”
And didn’t Asimov have something similar?
“In many of the more relaxed civilizations on the Outer Eastern Rim of the Galaxy, the Hitchhiker's Guide has already supplanted the great Encyclopaedia Galactica as the standard repository of all knowledge and wisdom, for though it has many omissions and contains much that is apocryphal, or at least wildly inaccurate, it scores over the older, more pedestrian work in two important respects.
First, it is slightly cheaper; and secondly it has the words DON'T PANIC inscribed in large friendly letters on its cover.”
I think it also goes into detail about the decentralized nature of the editing staff in a big way. Anyway I remember thinking, “Oh, it’s just Douglas Adams conceptualizing wikipedia 25 years ahead of schedule.”
And didn’t Asimov have something similar?
We must remember that Wikipedia did accumulate enough articles to be considered an encyclopedia until about 2006 or later. Also many relied on phone line dial-up modems. Before that, Internet searches turned up articles of sporadic reliability. For instance, look up “Neanderthal Man” and you got some very conflicting stories, many inspired by creationists, using wording like “before the flood.” A search for bicycle paths might turn up a link to a porn sight because certain words were “baited” with multiple posts and fabricated hits.
I do agree that a pay per use sights would be more common.
I do agree that a pay per use sights would be more common.
marathag
Banned
Well this doesn't happen then
Microsoft Encarta Dies After Long Battle With Wikipedia
By Noam Cohen March 30, 2009 10:23 pm March 30, 2009 10:23 pm
Microsoft delivered the coup de grâce Monday to its dying Encarta encyclopedia, acknowledging what everyone else realized long ago: it just couldn’t compete with Wikipedia, a free, collaborative project that has become the leading encyclopedia on the Web.
In January, Wikipedia got 97 percent of the visits that Web surfers in the United States made to online encyclopedias, according to the Internet ratings service Hitwise. Encarta was second, with 1.27 percent. Unlike Wikipedia, where volunteer editors quickly update popular entries, Encarta can be embarrassingly outdated. The entry for Joseph R. Biden Jr., for example, identifies him as vice president-elect and a U.S. senator.
The Encarta software will be removed from stores by June, Microsoft said, and the affiliated worldwide Web sites will be closed by the end of October. (The Japanese site will continue until the end of December.)
Without mentioning Wikipedia directly, Microsoft explained its decision on a FAQ page for Encarta. “The category of traditional encyclopedias and reference material has changed,” it said. “People today seek and consume information in considerably different ways than in years past. As part of Microsoft’s goal to deliver the most effective and engaging resources for today’s consumer, it has made the decision to exit the Encarta business.”
On that same page, the company asked itself if other Microsoft educational software would be discontinued as well. Its answer: “We’re not making any other announcements at this time.” The bulk of the Microsoft FAQ page explains how subscribers to the Encarta service could get a refund on what they had paid.
In the mid- to late 1980s, when Encarta began as a pet project of Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, it had the potential to be as unsettling to the traditional encyclopedia business as Wikipedia is today.
After being rebuffed by Encyclopedia Britannica as a partner in making material available to personal computer users as a CD-ROM, Microsoft in 1989 went to Funk & Wagnalls and decided to make “a virtue of necessity,” according to 2006 case history by Professor Shane Greenstein and Michelle Devereux for the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University.
“Microsoft could not build its encyclopedia on the highest-quality content,” they wrote. “Instead, it invested in choice graphics and sound to bring value to its product.”
In the pre-Internet and early Internet era, Encarta was an example of Microsoft trying to enhance the experience of PC users –- a way of selling the computer experience to an unfamiliar public.
“You could very much argue that Encarta, was a me-too product, a way to add some more value to the Microsoft suite” of software that came with Windows, said Andrew Lih, author of “The Wikipedia Revolution,” a new history of Wikipedia. “Microsoft never added the resources or brainpower to be anything more than that.” (I wrote about Mr. Lih’s book and the significance of Wikipedia in Sunday’s Times.)
As the amount of information available online grew exponentially, it became quaint to purchase DVDs of factual material. While a free, text-oriented project like Wikipedia could not compete with the graphics and design of Encarta, that wasn’t important to consumers.
Still, Mr. Lih said something would be lost in the shuttering of Encarta. “Bill Gates bought Corbis, and Encarta had access to all these images that Wikipedia could never get,” he said. “Right now, that is a big weakness of Wikipedia -– the material has to be free.”
So what happens is that Encarta moves from subscription based to ad-based, like many other 'Free' online programs, because Gates sees it can be more in this Wiki-less TL
I think this is the only (rather unlikely) TL in which something like Wikipedia does not exist... https://www.alternatehistory.com/fo...nyone-remember-the-so-called-internet.378130/
Wikipedia is the truth. Wikipedia is inevitable. Do not try to resist it.
Resistance to the wiki is futile. We will add your biological and technological distinctiveness & knowledge to our own. Your culture will adapt to service us.