Recent Hitwise reports tell us that Wikipedia’s traffic has grown 154 percent during the past year. It now threatens to surpass traffic to the New York Times site-one of the few successful news brands online-and other major news sites.
It might be to simple to say that news has become a commodity nowadays. Wisdom is not a commodity. News brands of the highest order are thought to be the fountains of wisdom. In many cases, columnists are big brands and in turn, they help build up a news brand. Take the case of Huffington Post which has attracted hordes of celebrity posters.
The bigger point is the emergence of social intellignece, the most popular form of which is Google which ranks pages on the basis of links they get. In other words, it simply uses the brains of others. That is exactly what Wikipedia is doing. And in doing so, it not only is competeing successfully with the likes of The New York Times, but that old standard, Encyclopedia Britannica.
Call it a positive side of The Borg Colony.
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