Wikipedia's most valuable brand asset is trust. For the information portal, which turned 10 last year, to maintain its credibility, and its value, it must cultivate trust with its users, and create trust that self-interested parties are not influencing its product, i.e., its content.

So new questions about Wikipedia editors taking money to change content could combust into the greatest threat the brand has seen to date, bigger than waning interest and wooing academia or even rivals vying for its perch. One Wikipedia watcher suggests scandals are already taking a toll on Wikipedia's bottom line.Continue reading...

Wikipedia celebrated its 10th birthday on January 15, and founder Jimmy Wales is still running fast to keep his free encyclopedia growing.

The latest outreach is to academia, a segment that until recently eschewed this disintermediating model, but is now slowly joining the world’s largest crowdsourced experiment.Continue reading...

Wikipedia cofounder Jimmy Wales sat down with Jon Stewart to mark the site's upcoming 10th anniversary. It wasn't a complete love-in, but it was certainly a sign of the ubiquity of the topic-based online brand's status, spurred by its top-of-the-page high rankings in search results.

As the infamous model of globally crowdsourced content with an ad-free business model marks its first decade on January 15th, Wikipedia has withstood intense criticism about reliability, been shunned by academia, and sustained brutal edit wars, all while maintaining online dominance and consistently turning up in top 10 Google results to become the fifth biggest website in the world.Continue reading...