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Could Wikipedia's Future Be as a Development Platform?

Source: ReadWriteWeb

Feb 23, 2009

Summary

Content creation at Wikipedia is slowing down. The already small number of active regular editors is on the decline and Jimmy Wales has called for live edits to be held for approval on many pages, a step sure to slow contributions even further.

The tapering of fresh content doesn't have to mean Wikipedia's death, though. The site contains a gargantuan amount of human created and tended but largely machine readable and structured data. That's a potential gold mine in terms of a potential pay-off in innovation. Wikipedia can offer developers opportunities to glean analysis, suplemental content and structured data from its years old store of collaboratively generated information. All of that is possible, but a Wikipedia as platform can't be taken for granted.

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Above: Edit history via the WikiDashboard browser add-on, by Paul Irish.

If the sun is setting on Wikipedia's time as a fast-growing collection of user contributed knowledge - maybe that part of the site's life was just its adolescence. Wiki inventor Ward Cunningham told us he thinks the moves

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Comments (1)

Hutch,

Feb 23, 2009

"Content creation at Wikipedia is slowing down. The already small number of active regular editors is on the decline and Jimmy Wales has called for live edits to be held for approval on many pages, a step sure to slow contributions even further.

The tapering of fresh content doesn't have to mean Wikipedia's death, though. The site contains a gargantuan amount of human created and tended but largely machine readable and structured data. That's a potential gold mine in terms of a potential pay-off in innovation."