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Unpaid Wikipedia beat paid Encarta
Encarta started in the mid-1990s with all the right incentives deployed. Well-compensated managers oversaw the whole project to make sure it came in on budget and on time.
A few years later, another encyclopedia got started on a different model. No one was paid a cent, a euro, or a yen, and people contributed because they liked doing it.
At the time, not a single sober economist anywhere on earth would have predicted that the unpaid approach would come out ahead. Wikipedia won in a knockout, which makes it a contest between people driven by autonomy, mastery, and purpose and people driven by carrots and sticks.
How did Wikipedia grow without paid writers?
Wikipedia launched on January 15, 2001, started by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger as a side project of Nupedia, an encyclopedia written by experts and reviewed slowly. Wiki software lets anyone edit a page and keeps a full history of every change, so a mistake can be undone in seconds. Volunteers write and police the articles, while the servers are run by the Wikimedia Foundation, a nonprofit funded largely by donations. The foundation was set up in 2003.
Why did Microsoft end Encarta?
Microsoft announced in March 2009 that it would discontinue Encarta. The company said the way people look for information had changed since the encyclopedia was first sold. Encarta had first shipped on CD-ROM in 1993, when a disc could hold more text than a shelf of printed volumes. The disc editions stopped selling in 2009.
Why do people edit Wikipedia for free?
Oded Nov, an information systems researcher, surveyed Wikipedia contributors in a 2007 study published in Communications of the ACM. Enjoyment and ideology, meaning a belief that knowledge should be freely available, ranked among the strongest reasons people gave for contributing. Contributors also cited the chance to learn and to make use of their own skills. Nov's survey asked about motives across a range of categories, from career benefits to social ties.
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