William Beutler on Wikipedia

Posts Tagged ‘Quora’

Is Quora the Next Wikipedia? Part IV: If Personnel is Policy, then Userbase is Destiny

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on March 7, 2011 at 2:53 pm

In three posts last week, I considered how buzzy Q&A website Quora is more like Wikipedia than not. In this post, I’ll address how the different organizations behind them may affect the communities surrounding each.

For all of Quora’s upbeat talk about wanting to become “the best place” for answering questions on any conceivable topic, it is first and foremost a for-profit enterprise, and one allegedly worth somewhere between $300 million and $1 billion. It’s not hard to imagine how outside pressures (such as those from investors) might eventually force Quora to choose between the best thing for its community’s experience and the best thing for its financial well-being.

In fact, this probably has already discouraged one type of editor: the free culture / free software crowd, who helped build Wikipedia. One would think these folks might otherwise be interested in building a universal repository of information—but not if it’s a closed system. As we’ve seen in the unhapphiness of some Huffington Post bloggers following that site’s sale to AOL, one needn’t be a close follower of Richard Stallman to have questions about spending a lot of time helping to build a resource that may never produce a monetary return. Now, I am not saying those complaining about HuffPo are right, or discounting that participation on such platforms can be rewarding for non-monetary reasons. But it’s something Quora will have to look out for.

Wikipedia and Quora logosA good example involves an incident well-known at Wikipedia where, in the site’s early years, a significant number of editors on Wikipedia’s nascent Spanish-language edition decamped over such concerns. Among several reasons for the split, the most significant involved a suggestion (not even a real proposal) that Wikipedia would pay the bills by selling ads on the website. At the time, Wikipedia belonged to a private company owned by Jimmy Wales, and its url was www.wikipedia.com. So they left and started a competitor, Enciclopedia Libre Universal. The Spanish-language Wikipedia eventually recovered and outpaced its rival, but not for several years. (Wikipedians call this the “Spanish Fork”; for more information see this Jauary 2011 interview and Andrew Lih’s book, The Wikipedia Revolution.)

It probably doesn’t matter whether Quora might one day include advertising, because these types of editors would never have showed up in the first place. Let’s imagine, just for the moment, that they did open up advertising. One way or another, that would end up influencing content, which would be hard to reconcile with their stated goal that “each question page become the best possible resource for someone who wants to know about the question.” Even if advertising didn’t influence content, it would inevitably interfere with it.

A handy comparison is Twitter: a few years back, one of it co-founders inadvisably pledged the site would “never” have advertising. They came up with a clever solution in Promoted Tweets, but there are still backlashes in store, like the one this past weekend over the “quickbar” added to Twitter’s iPhone app. And remember, the question here is not whether Quora will alienate participants so much they all leave—but whether enough disengage or never show up to keep it from competing with Wikipedia for mindshare in a serious way.

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Of course, it must be acknowledged that Wikipedia’s being a non-profit foundation (taking over for Wales’ dot com in 2003) comes with its own drawbacks. Late last year, many readers expressed displeasure with the months-long banner campaign featuring Wales and others “begging” for money. But they say this about NPR, too. And while its listeners put up with it (even as they sometimes put in for it) there is a huge audience of people who like neither the content nor the management, and stay away.

Apple vs. AndroidOne thing about being a hot new startup does help Quora: it has a dedicated design team actively working on the site design, and can make decisions more quickly. Wikipedia often struggles to make big changes, and with implementation of Flagged revisions or the debate over paid editing, disagreement can lead to paralysis and a default to the status quo.

At the moment, which is better remains a philosophical question: Wikipedia’s open and free nature vs. Quora’s closed and proprietary model. If you think that sounds like an easy question, consider the debate between Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android. The two operating systems are currently very competitive, and it’s an open question which will pull ahead. Applications within Apple’s closely-regulated App Store are far more reliable and considered to be of higher quality than those within Google’s open app marketplace.

For any number of reasons, this may not be a great analogy for discussing Wikipedia and Quora. But consider how competitive the Android platform might be if it had debuted not one year after Apple’s iPhone but ten years. If Quora had launched at the beginning of the 2000s instead of its end, we might be talking about a very different competition. Right now, it is difficult to see how Quora can close the gap (more like a vast gulf) between itself and Wikipedia. At least, it won’t happen anytime soon.

But perhaps the Wikipedia comparison is setting the bar too high. Quora is an interesting platform, and I don’t see why it needs to achieve a Wikipedia-like ubiquity to become useful. It certainly needs to displace Yahoo! Answers, and it needs to start showing up in Google search results. If its community continues to grow and build out its content in areas that Wikipedia doesn’t want to cover, then it just might have a chance. The philosophical difference is resolvable only with data: as Quora develops in months and years to come, we’ll see how it stacks up. I’ll still be spending most of my time on Wikipedia, both as a reader and an editor. But if I can’t find it there, my next stop will definitely be Quora.

Follow me on Quora, if you are so inclined.

Is Quora the Next Wikipedia? Part III: It’s the Little Differences

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on March 4, 2011 at 9:39 am

In two previous posts, I have explored a comparison between Wikipedia and the upstart platform Quora, the first setting the stage for discussion, and the second explaining the (acknowledged) debt one owes the other. In this post, I will discuss how they differ in ways you’ve surely noticed—and ways you might not.

Writing a detailed explanation of how Wikipedia and Quora differ is a foolhardy assignment (and an even more foolish self-assignment). Because one is descended from the paper encyclopedia and the other comes from the Q&A genre, it’s hard to know where to begin. But we can make some observations:

The most significant difference between Quora and Wikipedia is a philosophical one: they simply do not share the same definition of “knowledge”. As you might imagine, this matters quite a bit and, in fact, Jimmy Wales’ best-known quote is arguably the following:

“Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge. That’s what we’re doing.”

That is certainly what a Wikipedian might say he or she is doing. Your average Quoran (if that’s the preferred nomenclature) might not immediately find reason to disagree. But given further investigation they may find Wikipedia to be something less than that. Perhaps the best summary of these competing viewpoints comes from the Seb Paquet essay at The Quora Review linked in my first post. In it, he writes:

Wikipedia reflects consensus reality, or tries very hard to do so. In this respect, you could say that Wikipedia is past-bound: it offers knowledge of what has been known. However, there’s another segment of the world’s knowledge that is hazy and tentative. It is emphatically not validated. It is contentious. It is controversial. It’s messy. You could call it pre-knowledge.

On Wikipedia, the most concise definition of Wikipedia considers useful knowledge is encapsulated in the “General notability guideline”, which states:

If a topic has received significant coverage in reliable sources that are independent of the subject, it is presumed to satisfy the inclusion criteria for a stand-alone article or stand-alone list.

Quora has yet to develop anything quite so pithy, although its About page contains numerous statements which altogether produce a clear vision. As “notability” is the primary basis for inclusion at Wikipedia, “reusability” seems to play the same role at Quora:

“Each question page on Quora is a reusable resource that should help everyone who has the question that the page is about. … There is only one version of each distinct question on the site, so everyone who is interested in or knows about that material is focused on that one place.”

We can leave aside a careful exploration of what consitutes “reusable”, in part because so has Quora: to date they have not placed too many limits on what readers can contribute, only in what format they may contribute it. Wikipedia, on the other hand, has already developed a lengthy list of things that it does not wish to do, helpfully titled “What Wikipedia is not”. Among these, Wikipedia is not a “publisher of original thought”, nor a “manual, guidebook” or “crystal ball”. Quora seems OK with all that.

One effect of Wikipedia’s “narrow” focus is that it serves as a handy guide for other websites (and their backers) to identify a niche that avoids competing directly with Wikipedia. While other electronic encyclopedias have fallen to Wikipedia, specialization has worked for other projects. A good example of how this works is Wikia, founded by none other than Jimbo Wales himself, which smartly capitalizes on “what Wikipedia is not” and finds opportunities on the other side; because Wikipedia policies imply a limited appetite and minimum standards for information about Star Wars, the Wikia-hosted Wookiepedia is there to take up the slack.

Wikipedia and Quora logosAn example from outside the family might be the Internet Movie Database. Although IMDb’s original incarnation predates Wikipedia by more than 20 years, the point is that it has survived, and even thrived. For all kinds of information about motion pictures, IMDb is better because it wants more of that kind of information than Wikipedia does.

Quora too wants more information than Wikipedia, except it wants more of everything. In some respects this has its advantages; as Paquet goes on to say, Wikipedia is “past-bound” whereas Quora is “future-oriented”. I think that may be a little too rosy an assessment; one cannot overlook the possibility that Quora won’t necessarily be good at either. If you want to be everything to everybody, pretty soon you’ll be nothing to nobody. But I do think Quora recognizes this, and is watching to see how things develop, and will probably introduce more restrictions as time goes on.

And that brings us to another key difference: the organizations behind the websites and their relationship to users. I’ll get to those in the fourth (and final?) installment of this series. Look for that next week.

Why not follow me on Quora? Indeed, why not.

Is Quora the Next Wikipedia? Part I

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on February 28, 2011 at 10:13 am

In the past few months, I’ve become increasingly interested in the hit startup website Quora. If you’re not familiar with it, the simplest explanation is that it’s a Q&A website that gets right what earlier incarnations got wrong.* A longer explanation would include a discussion of why it is much more ambitious.

To expand on the point: Answers.com is a wasteland of unanswered questions and no visible community, while Quora has real enthusiasts. ChaCha has more reliable respondents, but they are paid generalists who may not know much about a given topic. Yahoo! Answers seems to have a genuine community, albeit one full of know-nothings. Quora, on the other hand, has attracted the participation of experts (at least in tech) who volunteer their time to create new content on topics of their own interest.

Does this sound like any other websites you know?

Quora’s strengths as a social media platform and Q&A site are evident: it looks sharp and stylish, seems to be well thought out, and has followed the Facebook-Twitter model of starting with a core group of likeminded users before gradually expanding its user base. While it is very far from being a household word, it is often enough compared to those two social media juggernauts, and in fact has early Facebook employees on board. But more and more it is being compared to Wikipedia, which answers the question (so to speak) about why I’ve become so fascinated by it.

To wit: A recent post by Techcrunch editor Mike Arrington declared that Quora was about building “a better Wikipedia”. John Keehler at Random Culture recently called it “Wikipedia, Evolved”. In response to these, Teluq-UQAM professor Seb Paquet published an essay at The Quora Review titled “Why Quora is Not Wikipedia”.

But if Quora’s goal is to “beat” Wikipedia—and I have not heard its founders claim this as a goal—it is very far from doing so now. For virtually every topic Wikipedia addresses, the site is usually found at or near the top of relevant search engine results. Its ubiquity is so great that some have speculated Google purposefully elevates Wikipedia in search results (the more likely reason is that wiki software does many things Google bots look for, and many people link to it). Quora, on the other hand, is nowhere to be found in most searches.

Wikipedia contains 3.5 million separate articles (in its English edition alone), each of which may cover several related topics in detail. And with a few million more “redirects” also catching the eye of Google’s crawlers, the number of opportunities for Wikipedia to land a prominent position on a search results page may be in the neighborhood of ten million. The number of questions on Quora is, at present, not public information.

Any way you slice the numbers, Wikipedia is one of the top ten websites in the United States and the entire world. According to Alexa, Quora is at best the 1,269th website in the United States, and is so far limited to the English language. Wikipedia has been around for more than ten years; Quora, less than two. Whatever Quora might achieve in the future, it has not yet. Wikipedia certainly has.

Quora and Wikipedia are unique in many ways, but to focus on where they are different is to gloss over what they have in common. Meanwhile, Arrington’s flat statement that Quora is “better” greatly oversimplifies the matter. Instead, I’d like to examine what they do have in common, and how they may compete with or complement each other.

In my next post, that’s just what I’ll do.

P.S. If you’d like, you can follow me on Quora.

* On Twitter, Matt Bucher reminds me of Ask MetaFilter, which is different in several ways from the sites discussed above. He is right to identify it as a quality site; the MetaFilter community has been well-cultivated in its decade-plus existence, and is a fine and frequently thoughtful resource for its community. However, I think that’s all it ever plans to be: one section of a larger online community.