Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2022-11-28/Op-Ed

Julle began editing the Swedish Wikipedia in 2004. He's authored a book, Wikipedia inifrån (Wikipedia from the Inside), published in 2022, and currently works for the Wikimedia Foundation's Product Department. This text is unrelated to his work, and the opinions expressed are his own.

When Wikipedia took over the world, it wasn't on the basis of article quality. If Wikipedia one day is replaced, it likely won't be because someone does what we do better.

In his widely influential 1997 book The Innovator's Dilemma, American scholar of business administration Clayton Christensen investigated how dominant technologies are overtaken by new ones, and how the old organisations rarely managed to retain their positions as their industries shifted to a new paradigm. A key observation in Christensen's book is how the new technology, a product that is a break from tradition rather than a continuous improvement of the existing technology, is typically not better than the one it is replacing, but merely cheaper, simpler, more convenient.^[1]

This echoes our experience: while Wikipedia's large language versions have long come out favourably in comparison to traditional printed encyclopedias, this largely happened after we achieved our position as the predominant source of information. In recent years, our reputation has changed for the better in countries like the United States or Sweden, as people belatedly realised that the Wikipedia of 2018 was not the same thing as the Wikipedia of 2004, but this was not necessarily correlated with increased readership in these areas.^[2] It seems largely irrelevant to readers' decision to use us as a source of information – for that, we didn't need to be good. We just needed to be good enough, and then other factors – price, easy access – made all the difference.