I found this little nugget in today’s New York Times article New Web Sites Seeking Profit in Wiki Model:
.. in January 2005 he [Jack Herrick] started wikiHow, a how-to guide built on the same open-source software as Wikipedia, which lets anyone write and edit entries in a collaborative system. To his surprise he found that many of the entries generated by Internet users — free — were more informative than those written by freelancers.
The article, which is concerned with the business of making money from wikis, doesn’t say why the articles were more informative. It could have been the sharpening of focus and content by the number of contributors, or it could have been something relatively new.
That is that the internet makes it much easier than ever before to get well-versed experts (amateur or pro) to contribute their knowledge, often for free. Many freelancers, after all, are generalists, whose skills and talents lie not in a particular field, but in finding things out and presenting the results in a well-written form.
With an increasingly wired world and the rise of wikis, publishers don’t have to rely on freelancers or finding experts. In James Herrick’s case, I suspect, they found him and gladly pitched in.
Which leads to a question: is the rise of wikis on a wide variety of topics (and even as a form of newsgathering) as potentially disruptive to freelancing as Flickr is to professional photographers?. (Link is to a previous post.)
TAGS: WIKIS, FREELANCING
It definitely changes the balance, no doubt it raises the bar to surviving as a freelancer, perhaps making it more important to put more emphasis on the entrepreneurial aspects- marketing and business development- to ensure key business relationships exist to help sustain one’s work.
Wikis, YouTube movies, bloggers, photo sharing sites, music published straight to the internet, even reality TV are all lowering the cost of producing and finding quality content. For the most part their success depends on a much much much larger population of folks generating far more content than professionals can, most of which isn’t very good. But even a tiny percentage of that content which is top notch can cut into the markets for traditional professional freelancers.
What’s interesting to me about the wired wiki world is that is seems to amplify the value of the editorial role – the rarer skills may be the ability to weed through the pile, research and select content worthy to highlight, discuss, and communicate widely.
Any good Wiki is going to need a bunch of great senior editors to keep it on track, now that anyone can be a junior editor…