The record and movie industries are not the only industries to find themselves affected by free access to their products. Encyclopedia Britannica faces challenges by a nonprofit competitor that provides its services without charge or advertising, Wikipedia.org. Wikipedia depends on volunteers to create and edit original content under the condition that contributors provide their work without copyright. Who would work for free? During the creation of the Oxford English Dictionary in the 19th century, the editors solicited word articles and references from the general public. In the 20th century, AOL.com found thousands of volunteers to monitor its chat rooms. Amazon.com coaxed more than 100,000 readers to post book reviews on its retail Web site. Outdoing them all in the 21st century, Wikipedia published its one-millionth English language article in March 2006. Wikipedia includes more than two million articles in more than 200 languages, all created and edited by more than one million users.
Can Wikipedia compete on quality? Wikipedia provides its users both editing and monitoring tools, which allows users to self-police. Wikipedia also uses voluntary administrators who block vandals, temporarily protect articles, and manage arbitration processes when disputes arise. A paper published by Nature in December 2005 evaluated 50 Wikipedia articles and found an average of four factual errors per Wikipedia article compared with an average of three errors per article in the Encyclopedia Britannica. More significantly, Wikipedians (as the volunteers call themselves) corrected each error by January 2006. Alexa.com rated
Wikipedia.org as the 17th most visited Web site on the Internet, while Britannica.com came in 2,858th place (Yahoo and Google ranked in the 1st and 2nd places).
Wikipedia has already built on its success. In addition to offering foreign language encyclopedias, it also provides a common media archive (commons. wikimedia.org), a multilingual dictionary (www.wiktionary.org), and a news service (www.wikinews.org).
a. How does the Wikimedia Foundation meet the criteria for an agile company?
b. How does the Wikimedia Foundation meet the criteria for a virtual company?
c. How does the Wikimedia Foundation meet the criteria for a knowledge-creating organization?
d. How would you recommend that Encyclopedia Britannica adapt to this new threat?