Wikipedia - a successful project Crowdsourcing

Anyone who has ever tried anything on the Internet knows Wikipedia. This is a great online encyclopedia that has information on just about anything you can think of. Despite all the controversy, according to Alexa and other sources Wikipedia is currently the greatest and most important general reference on the Internet.

Wikipedia was formally launched January 15, 2001, as a single edition in English to wikipedia.com and grew to about 20,000 items and 18 language editions by the end of 2001. In August 2009, the English Wikipedia has reached 3 million articles.

All this information is not only used by a huge crowd of people, but has also been created by the crowd. Wikipedia is a project based on the model of crowdsourcing, which are turned on work traditionally done by employees to the Internet crowd, or the mob.

Wikipedia 14 million (3.1 million articles in English) have been written collaboratively by volunteers around the world, and almost all of his articles can be edited by anyone with access to the site. If you read an article and notice something wrong or if you have more information on the subject, you can go and change it or provide more detailed explanations. In this way the information is verified and continuously enriched by several people who share the same interest. But, on the other hand, because of this characteristic of the articles are exposed to vandalism.

An early study conducted by researchers at IBM in 2003 concluded that vandalism on Wikipedia is usually repaired extremely quickly, so most users will never see its effects. Another study published in Nature in 2005 showed that for scientific articles Wikipedia came close to the level of accuracy in Encyclopaedia Britannica and had a similar rate of serious errors.

This demonstrates the great potential and power of the crowd. With the tools we have available today in the Internet age, with groups able to come together and communicate more easily than ever, it is amazing to see large projects to be so easily achieved.

Crowdsourcing is a model that works great! E 'has been shown by many successful projects. I'm sure the businessmen increasingly apply this concept to various projects and build successful companies.

Google, Amazon, Procter and Gamble, Hewlett-Packard, Lego, Pepsi, Cambrian House Canada, Eli Lilly (Innocentive), Kraft, General Mills, Nike, MasterCard, iStockphoto, Zebo are just some of the companies that are successful crowdsourcing projects. CrowdsourcingPower is a new company that gives everyone the opportunity to earn money through a crowdsourcing project.

Let me conclude with a question raised by Don Tapscott (1) - "After all, if you can make an encyclopedia (Wikipedia) via social networking and mass collaboration, what else could he do?" or, I should say "... what else could I do?"

(1) Don Tapscott is CEO of the think tank New Paradigm and author of 11 books, most recently, with Anthony D. Williams, Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything. The quotation is taken from the preface to We Are Smarter Me by Barry Libert and Jon Spector, 2008, Wharton School Publishing .......