Is Quora the Next Wikipedia? Part III: It's the Little Differences
In two previous posts, I have explored a comparison between Wikipedia and the upstart platform Quora, the first setting the stage for discussion, and the second explaining the (acknowledged) debt one owes the other. In this post, I will discuss how they differ in ways you've surely noticed—and ways you might not.
Writing a detailed explanation of how Wikipedia and Quora differ is a foolhardy assignment (and an even more foolish self-assignment). Because one is descended from the paper encyclopedia and the other comes from the Q&A genre, it's hard to know where to begin. But we can make some observations:
On Wikipedia, one's name does not appear with the material you create, but on Quora it does.
Wikipedia welcomes anonymous edits and assiduously protects users' privacy, if they want it; Quora requires users to write under their real name.
Whereas Wikipedia has a complicated relationship with experts and expertise, Quora welcomes their participation.
More subtly: Wikipedia's three core content policies require that information be presented in a neutral manner, cannot be new analysis, and must be publicly verifiable. Not so on Quora, where you are free to express your point of view, share your personal experiences and make flat assertions.
The most significant difference between Quora and Wikipedia is a philosophical one: they simply do not share the same definition of "knowledge". As you might imagine, this matters quite a bit and, in fact, Jimmy Wales' best-known quote is arguably the following:
"Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge. That’s what we’re doing."
That is certainly what a Wikipedian might say he or she is doing. Your average Quoran (if that's the preferred nomenclature) might not immediately find reason to disagree. But given further investigation they may find Wikipedia to be something less than that. Perhaps the best summary of these competing viewpoints comes from the Seb Paquet essay at The Quora Review linked in my first post. In it, he writes:
Wikipedia reflects consensus reality, or tries very hard to do so. In this respect, you could say that Wikipedia is past-bound: it offers knowledge of what has been known. However, there’s another segment of the world’s knowledge that is hazy and tentative. It is emphatically not validated. It is contentious. It is controversial. It’s messy. You could call it pre-knowledge.
On Wikipedia, the most concise definition of Wikipedia considers useful knowledge is encapsulated in the "General notability guideline”, which states:
If a topic has received significant coverage in reliable sources that are independent of the subject, it is presumed to satisfy the inclusion criteria for a stand-alone article or stand-alone list.
Quora has yet to develop anything quite so pithy, although its About page contains numerous statements which altogether produce a clear vision. As "notability" is the primary basis for inclusion at Wikipedia, "reusability" seems to play the same role at Quora:
"Each question page on Quora is a reusable resource that should help everyone who has the question that the page is about. ... There is only one version of each distinct question on the site, so everyone who is interested in or knows about that material is focused on that one place."
We can leave aside a careful exploration of what consitutes "reusable", in part because so has Quora: to date they have not placed too many limits on what readers can contribute, only in what format they may contribute it. Wikipedia, on the other hand, has already developed a lengthy list of things that it does not wish to do, helpfully titled "What Wikipedia is not”. Among these, Wikipedia is not a "publisher of original thought", nor a "manual, guidebook" or "crystal ball". Quora seems OK with all that.
One effect of Wikipedia's "narrow" focus is that it serves as a handy guide for other websites (and their backers) to identify a niche that avoids competing directly with Wikipedia. While other electronic encyclopedias have fallen to Wikipedia, specialization has worked for other projects. A good example of how this works is Wikia, founded by none other than Jimbo Wales himself, which smartly capitalizes on "what Wikipedia is not" and finds opportunities on the other side; because Wikipedia policies imply a limited appetite and minimum standards for information about Star Wars, the Wikia-hosted Wookiepedia is there to take up the slack.
An example from outside the family might be the Internet Movie Database. Although IMDb's original incarnation predates Wikipedia by more than 20 years, the point is that it has survived, and even thrived. For all kinds of information about motion pictures, IMDb is better because it wants more of that kind of information than Wikipedia does.
Quora too wants more information than Wikipedia, except it wants more of everything. In some respects this has its advantages; as Paquet goes on to say, Wikipedia is "past-bound" whereas Quora is "future-oriented". I think that may be a little too rosy an assessment; one cannot overlook the possibility that Quora won't necessarily be good at either. If you want to be everything to everybody, pretty soon you'll be nothing to nobody. But I do think Quora recognizes this, and is watching to see how things develop, and will probably introduce more restrictions as time goes on.
And that brings us to another key difference: the organizations behind the websites and their relationship to users. I'll get to those in the fourth (and final?) installment of this series. Look for that next week.
Why not follow me on Quora? Indeed, why not.