Wikipedia and Rhapsody

In a sense, you can think of Wikipedia as equivalent to Rhapsody, the music site.

There are the popular top 1,000, which can be found in any encyclopedia: Julius Caesar, World War II, Statistics, etc. These are like the hit songs. With these, Wikipedia is competing with professionals at their best, who produce well-written, authoritative entries that deploy facts with the easy comfort that comes with great scholarship.

The main advantage of the user-created Wikipedia model for these entries is its ability to be up-to-date, have unlimited length and visual aids (such as photos and charts), include copious links to support material elsewhere, and perhaps, better represent alternate views and controversies.

In the middle of the curve, from the 1,000th entry to where Britannica ends at 80,000, are the narrower subjects: Caesarian Section, Okinawa, Regression Analysis, etc. Here, the Wikipedia model begins to pull ahead of its professional competition.

Unlimited space means that the Wikipedia entries tend to be longer and more comprehensive. While the average length of a Britannica entry is 678 words, more than 200,000 Wikipedia entries (more than two entire Britannicas) are longer than that.

Meanwhile, the external links and updated information emerge as a key advantage as Wikipedia becomes a launching place for further research.

Then there is the Tail, from 80,000 to 1 million. These are the entries that Wikipedia has that no other encyclopedia even attempts to include.

Its articles on these subjects—Caesar Cipher, Canned Spam, Spearman’s Rank Correlation Coefficient—range from among the best in Wikipedia (those written by passionate experts) to the worst (self-promotion, score-settling, and pranks). While many critics focus on the worst entries, the really important thing about Wikipedia’s Tail is that there is nothing else like it anywhere.

From hard-core science to up-to-the-minute politics, Wikipedia goes where no other encyclopedia—whether constrained by paper or DVD limitations—can. Britannica doesn’t have an entry about the Long Tail phenomenon (yet), but Wikipedia’s entry is not only well written and thorough, it’s also 1,500 words long (and none of it was written by me!).