When you think Wikipedia, you think ency­clo­pe­dia. And when you think
ency­clo­pe­dia, you think edu­ca­tion, self enrich­ment and all kinds of
good stuff.

A trip to Wikipedi­a’s home page ini­tial­ly con­firms those impres­sions. It points you to rather edi­fy­ing con­tent: an intro­duc­tion to the Pash­tun peo­ple, an entry on the Aus­tralian pel­i­can, a look at the Vikings’ his­tor­i­cal exploits, etc. So far, so good. All very com­mend­able.

Now here’s the slight rub. Wikicharts
pur­ports to list the 100 most viewed pages on Wikipedi­a’s Eng­lish
lan­guage site, and very quick­ly the num­bers sug­gest that neti­zens
aren’t always mak­ing schol­ar­ly use of the web’s free ency­clo­pe­dia.
Here’s how some of the num­bers break down: In March 2007, 12 of the
100 most viewed pages on Wikipedia (includ­ing 4 of the top 20) deal with sex, some of
which goes beyond explain­ing the sim­ple birds and bees. (Con­sult the list for more on that.) Mean­while
anoth­er 30+ entries delve into pop cul­ture — South Park, Brit­ney
Spears, Anna Nicole Smith, you get the point.

So, how many touch on more square­ly edu­ca­tion­al top­ics? About 35.
And many of those include straight­for­ward entries on coun­tries (France,
India, Cana­da, etc.), or pieces that elu­ci­date the new block­buster
film, The 300. And while it’s good to see peo­ple using Wikipedia to under­stand the film, we all know that these more obscure his­tor­i­cal entries will fall off the top 100 list as quick­ly as movies come and go. That does­n’t leave too many entries that
are rem­i­nis­cent of an ency­clo­pe­dia. In the top 100, you get a hand­ful of clas­sic top­ics — entries on Ein­stein, Leonar­do da Vin­ci, and Glob­al
Warm­ing — but that is about it.

All of this sug­gests that there’s some­thing of a dis­con­nect between
how we per­ceive Wikipedia (or how Wikipedia por­trays itself) and how it
often gets used. Does this under­mine the val­ue of the more sub­stan­tive
pieces that you can find on the ency­clo­pe­dic site? Cer­tain­ly not.
Wikipedia can be a great resource when it is at its best. But it does
sug­gest that Wikipedi­a’s enrich­ing con­tent is not its most pop­u­lar, and
con­verse­ly that Wikipedi­a’s high­est traf­fic is flow­ing to con­tent that
prob­a­bly won’t be show­ing up on Wikipedi­a’s home­page any time soon.

Medi­aShift, the PBS blog which “tracks how new media—from weblogs to pod­casts to cit­i­zen journalism—are chang­ing soci­ety and cul­ture,” has just post­ed a new piece that you’ll want to check out. The arti­cle, giv­en the snap­py title “Will Video Kill the Audio Pod­cast­ing Star? Not Exact­ly,” takes a good look at how audio pod­casts are far­ing against YouTube-style video. Right now, YouTube is all the rage, so much so that “pod­casts” almost seem passé, despite being declared the “Word of the Year” by the New Oxford Amer­i­can Dici­tionary at the end of 2005. But accord­ing to Medi­aShift’s Mark Glaser, audio pod­casts are doing just fine, in part because they’re more ver­sa­tile. And as I explain in the arti­cle, audio pod­cast­ing should gain only more trac­tion in the com­ing years.

This point deserves per­haps a bit of elab­o­ra­tion. Audio pod­casts are at an inher­ent tech­no­log­i­cal dis­ad­van­tage vis-a-vis online video. Video stream­ing takes place with­in a famil­iar web envi­ron­ment. You call up a web page (on YouTube, for exam­ple), see the video, and click play. Peo­ple know how to do that. Mean­while, access­ing a pod­cast is some­what more involved. You have to own an iPod, be famil­iar with iTunes, and know how to sync pod­casts to your iPod. Or, even more com­pli­cat­ed, you have to get com­fort­able work­ing with RSS feeds, which is no easy feat. None of this is very straight­for­ward, and that is why we recent­ly cre­at­ed a Pod­cast Primer.

Now, as I men­tioned in the arti­cle, I do fore­see the gap clos­ing, at least some­what. The iPod has been a block­buster gad­get.  It’s quick­ly pen­e­trat­ing our soci­ety, and the com­fort lev­el of work­ing with iPods and relat­ed soft­ware is ris­ing. And that means that audio pod­casts should expe­ri­ence some good growth ahead. But will audio pod­casts ever com­pete with web video? I don’t think so, and that’s because we been liv­ing in a video cul­ture for some time, and that won’t be chang­ing any­time soon.