Last week, slashdot reported that despite amazing growth and traction, wikipedia might be failing.
It’s just semantics to the average user. If you look in mainstream media, Wikipedia is reported as being no worse than its analog predecessor, the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Steve Rubel posts on how wikipedia dominates brand search results. The site’s traffic has been growing steadily, climbing to 9th most visited US website in January 2007.
So "citizendum" has broken off as a rebel effort, of sorts. But if the portal wars of the late 90’s taught us anything, it’s the lessons that consumers only need one. And with the network effect of social computing, wikipedia becomes even more valuable.
Maybe it’s not a new death star after all. Maybe it’s really a borg cube.
[btw until I wrote these two posts, I had no idea I was such a geek at heart.]