A wikifac is a web-based information source typically hosted on Mediawiki and drawing much of its content from GPL sources such as Wikipedia and "value-adding" annotation, additional cross-linking and a mix of income-generating features such as Google Adsense, info-product spinoffs, Affiliate marketing links and micropayment tipboxes.
Wikifacs may be created manually or automatically generated; automated wikifacs are typically regarded as infospam. Similarly, wikifacs may feed their value-added information back to public-domain sources, although this is far from a universal practice.
Income from wikifacs is claimed to have been instrumental in the development of the Georgebox AI project (initially via the IZ databot interface). The wikifac craze of 2006–2007 has been credited with the addition of Mediawiki markup to HTML.
Business Model
editThe basic premise of the wikifac is similar to that of Wikipedia spin-offs Wikia and Digital Universe: that communities of users with specialist interests will collaborate spontaneously on public domain information resources if provided with free infrastructure. The wikifac model takes this further, concentrating on both community-building mailing lists, forums and chatrooms, and incentivising involvement both financially, academically and professionally.
As a commercial endeavour, a wikific can be positioned as a "niche leader", a reliable point of first contact and a distinct brand with a corporate personality specific to its market. Wikifac Foundation-coordinated inter-wiki collaboration and resource-sharing, ongoing development of Web 2.0 distributed infrastructure and a pc intellectual property regime helped ensure the early explosive success of the model, and to maintain the viability of the major players until human-generated content became commercially non-viable in the mid-2010s.
Incentives
editWikifacs historically allocate dividends equally between "marketing" and "development" (although major principals will typically receive shares from both profit pools). Developers are credited for work on articles using a variety of manual and algorithmic techniques. Additionally, many wikifacs affix an authorship credit to content blocks (such as articles, reviews, charts and diagrams) listing major and minor authors in niche-relevant terminology. Wikifacs typically make use of third-party attribution systems such at attribution.org to allocate payments.
Criticisms
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The neutrality of this section is disputed.
The monetization of the communitarian information-gathering character of projects such as Wikipedia remains a contentious issue. Incentivisation has long been known to de-motivate and un-focus most young adults (possibly 80% or more [1]), who have begun to self-characterise as non money-motivated. (Other studies suggest a higher receptivity in the self-selected information-gatherers of the early noughties.) Profit-taking necessarily withdraws value from self-sustaining systems (but if profit was not available, the self-identifyingly profit-motivated would not be incentivised to develop the intellectual property to enhance the "self-sustaining systems") and thus alternative methods of attracting contributors to the public domain have always resulted in greater value than those motivated primarily by acquisitiveness.
In response it has been claimed that wikifacs contributed to the inclusion in August 2008 of mediawiki markup in the w3's web standards [citation needed], and that over 13 million edits on wikipedia could be directly attributed to wikifac bot activity during August 2006–2007, with a further 4 million in 2008-2009 (although the quality of those edits has been heavily criticised). As an experiment in internet marketing-based profit-taking, the short-lived wikifac fad can perhaps best be said to have been over quickly.
See also
edit- Wikific
- The End of the World (As We Know It)
- Wikipedia:Send_in_the_clones re. wikifac-relevant SEO
External links
edit- Unspiracy, an example wikifac in development