Wikipedia did not replace books after all

I contributed to Wikipedia in its early days. It’s incredible that after so many years of contributions from so many people, there are still many, many areas where articles could be massively improved.

See the one about Startup companies. As of December 2018, it’s still weird. This surprised me.

In those idealistic years of the early 2000s, I was sure that by now almost all knowledge in the world would be captured in an open and free encyclopedia. I also believed that other forms of collaborative content would replace guide books and they would be much better.

I was very wrong. I have a few hypotheses as to why.

• Certain topics are so ambiguous that it’s a struggle to write about them in an objective way. The Wikipedia style is to write about “succinct description of dry verifiable facts”, but for these topics people want to write about their preferred insights. Insights are subjective, you can’t find scientific consensus about them, so the page becomes this mess of subjective observations about the topic.
• With certain topics, once you study and research them deeply enough, the incentives are to keep that knowledge to yourself because it gives you a competitive advantage.

These hypotheses could be tested by analyzing different WikiProjects and see if their ratio and total number of high-quality articles correlates with ambiguity and competitive value.

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If I were to write the Startup page today, I would delete almost everything and start with simple facts: definitions of what is a startup, how many are there, survival rate per year, a list of theories about startup success (if such theories exist), a list of growth methods, a list of fundraising methods, a list of company goals (revenue, growth, social benefits) and a list of exit scenarios (M&A, IPO, bankruptcy).

Could be a fun vacation project - maybe in 2030 :-).