Joho the Blog
An Entry from the Archives

Fantastic set of panelists: Jimmy Wikipedia Wales, Ethan Global Voices Zuckerman, Nicholas Debunker Carr, Martin NYT Martin Nisenholtz, moderated by Saul NYT Hansell.

Nick: Content is being atomized, fragmented. Each of the fragments has to stand on its own economically in the marketplace. But, the market works well for toasters, but not necessarily with books and articles. The cross-subsidies have provided much of what's good in newspapers and magazines. E.g., the classified ads pay for reporters to go to Africa. In an atomized world, you lose the cross-subsidies.

Martin: About.com is actually our biggest property on the Net. Our task is to turn people who come in through a side door (e.g., Google) into regular readers who engage with us as a package (as opposed to engaging with NYT atoms).

Jimmy: We have four employees and Wikipedia has four times the reach of About.com, compared with 150 there. And we have more than enough money to pay the bills each month. Communities can build content that others want to see using an economic model far less expensive...

Ethan: A lot of the old models haven't done a good job of covering the developing world. While I have enormous esteem for msm like the NYT, it's worth pointing out that the system isn't without its flaws. Writing for an interconnected world is much different than reporting for a newspaper...

Saul: Why don't Nick and Jimmy go at it...?

Nick: It's a myth that Wikipedia is an open collective without any centralized control that naturally gets better as the community engages. Wikipedia is evolving more and more hierarchical structures. In the history of culture, you could throw out all the collectively written stuff and never miss it. The myth sucks the air out of the market for any professionally created product.

Jimmy: I've been saying for years that Wikipedia is driven by a core community. That's always been the case. The "Edit this page" link gives people the wrong impression that it's about millions of people each writing one sentence. As far as it driving others out of business: That's their problem. And, btw, Wikipedia is more highly read in Germany than in America, and [the German encyclopedia publisher] Brockhaus' sales are up 30%. Maybe it's because Wikipedia reminds people that encyclopedias are cool.

Martin: Our research says that a relatively small group of people want to aggregate RSS feeds.

Jeff: I find it fascinating that this has turned into a panel on economics. And economics is about control. You, Nick, fear it, but the horse is out of the barn.
Ethan: Few of us want to lose the media's ability to put a reporter on an airplane. But we do want recognition of what's going on bottom up. [Paraphrasing!] Global Voices has 120 people around the world, but they're bloggers, not reporters. They have a different, complementary take on what's being reported by the msm.
Martin: We bought Blogrunner to make sure we can insinuate the Blogosphere at the article level.

Q: Nick, isn't Wikipedia really a hybrid model in which the small group of amateurs who run it are becoming professionalized? And, Ethan, is there anything we can do to make things work better in the next five years.
Nick: You're right. Wikipedia is moving toward a more professional structure. But there's still a question about how good it will be. Right now, it's mediocre with some very good entries and some very bad ones. But, because there's no money in it, there's no incentive for competing products, so you're left with less choice.

Jimmy: No money means less choice? Take a look at the Blogosphere. And the fact that Wikipedia is freely licensed means people take it and do all sorts of interesting things with it.
Martin: We have over 600 editors because we're trying to get at the best possible facts. We think the two worlds can coexist.

Ethan: There's been a revolution in mobile phones in Africa, but not laptops. Mobile phones are relevant to people lives because it's an economic tool: Should I bother going to a market, etc. Laptops are not relevant that way. Some of the communal tools online are developing on mobiles phones and talk radio. But that doesn't connect globally. We found during Live 8 that there's a disconnect that actually can be healed.

Q: Students rely on Wikipedia?
A: I get at least one email a week from a college student who says he got an F citing Wikipedia. I write back saying, "For God's sake, you're in college. Why are you citing an encyclopedia?" We tell people to be aware of what it is. It's pretty good but any particular page could have been edited five minutes ago, incorporating a new error. It's generally "good enough."

Q: How do links change society?
Ethan: At GV they let people around the world talk. When you see the next billion enter the Net, you'll see them build this into a medium of interconnection.

Saul: Spend some time on MySpace where people are turning their lives into media spaces.
Nick: So, we're training our children to gather information in shallow, superficial ways, and lose their ability to be contemplative.

Saul: Didn't we lose that with TV? Aren't we taking a half step back from TV?
Nick: I worry that understanding something will mean understanding it in how Google's Larry Page's algorithms understand the world.

Q: How do we help people become media literate?
Martin: Whenever we talk about professional versus non-professional, we're getting it wrong. They're complementary.

Saul: I think we're going to get very savvy about media.