Published Date: September 2, 2006

 

 

This is a very cool video with Wikipedia’s founder Jimmy Wales that I found via the entrepreneurship.de blog. It deals with how web communities are run and how work is “crowd-sourced” to the community.

Wikipedia statistics- 600,000 articles in English. Over 2 million total articles. More popular than the New York Times. 1 employee. 90 servers managed by volunteer system administrators. 1.4 billion page views per month. Roughly $5,000 per month for expenses (bandwidth). WOW

Crowd-sourcing at its peak- A tight-knit community of 600-1,000 people do the majority of the editing for Wikipedia. The community elects its own administrators and communicates via RSS, IRC, and mailing lists. Though Jimmy does have final say if necessary, he doesn’t feel the need to control the community. Afterall- he has no control over whether Wikipedia’s volunteers stop working, so they need to feel like the very important piece to the puzzle that they are.

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