Recently I posted about an interview with Jimmy Wales and only a couple days after that I ran across What Motivates Wikipedians in the November issue of ACM Communications. The motivations varied, with the primary ones being fun and ideology (knowledge should be free). There didn't seem to be one hugely compelling reason, but according to their numbers the average contributor puts in 8 hours a week.

That had me thinking about two things. First, maybe I should be contributing, both to give back some value and to better understand the work that goes into it. Adding that to my list, now to find a topic about which I can say something meaningful. The other point was a reiteration of something I already know; that communities are incredibly powerful things.

I was reading an interview with Jimmy Wales (the Wikipedia guy) in Selling Power magazine (I have ecletic reading preferences I know) and aside from the stuff about Wikipedia he talked a little about moving into search and how he hoped that by leveraging the lessons learned so far he might be able to produce better search results. That's an interesting idea if he can get it to work. I think Google is probably still the leader at search, but not by as much as they used to be. Search is almost a commodity. Almost! But there is still a lot of luck involved. Can a community approach remove the need for some of the luck? The wild card is the advertising. Advertising drives most of the gaming of search results, remove the advertising and people (and companies) would spend a lot less time on trying to increase their PageRank or equivalent score.

Wikipedia may not be perfect, but I find it helpful probably 95% of the time. Given the choice of working there or Google, I'd go with Wikipedia because I love the community aspect.