QUOTE(Peter Damian @ Sun 30th January 2011, 12:23pm)
QUOTE(Somey @ Sun 30th January 2011, 6:22pm)
But if Wikipedia were to set up something like Wikipedia Review.com, where the subject of an article can control what's on the page and still get the same amount of Google juice, then sure, the WMF would clean up. It would be a ca$h-grabbing bonanza. What's more, the organizational infrastructure required just to manage that part of the business would force the WMF to expand to, I dunno, at least twice its current size and maybe 4 or 5 times its current size, in terms of employees, office space, etc. - with all that such an expansion would entail. Obviously I hope they don't do that, because the WMF is bad enough as it is, without being a billion-dollar company. Imagine how much damage they could do with that kind of money.
MWB was a much better idea. The problem always was that there is only room for one Wikipedia. I have tested writing the same page on Wikipedia and on MWB. Wikipedia grabs the juice every time. And that's what I mean by 'it'. I don't want to buy the content, or even the name. I just want the ability to have everything I write get to #1 in Google. That's what people buying the advertising want, too.
There's an un-doable experiment I'd love to try: suppose Google were jiggered so that, for a year, it automatically put the Wikipedia Review (MWB) article above WP's, in any case where both articles existed. How long before MWB started to shoot into the statosphere? For all the "I get to control the article about my business and myself" reasons that Greg has mentioned.
The problem with WP is that Google sees it as one homogenous site, so that every article with 2000 page views a month gets the same ranking, when you search that term, as an article that gets 100 times more. There's something basically unfair about that.
However, this has allowed WP (as a WHOLE) to achieve "escape velocity," so that there's no way to catch any individual part of it now, in GOOGLE rankings. I believe it would take GOOGLE deliberately jiggering their own product, Google Knol, to get past that advantage now, so long as they insist on seeing en.wiki (and the other language wikis, too) as "single" websites, and not the many many sub-pages that each is composed of.
And Google has not done this, at least not yet. Example: search Google for "Knol." Sure, Google's own site comes up FIRST, then the help site for it. Then, (THIRD) WP's article on Knol, even though that page is only seen 5500 times a month on WP. All this is purely because the ENTIRE Knol site beats out the single WP article for this term, but it won't happen for any given page of Knol vs. any given page of Wikipedia. Example: Knol itself gives "Insomnia" as a good example article for Knol. But if you search on Google for "insomnia", WP's article on it comes up FIRST on page one, and I can't find the Knol article in first FIVE pages of the search (at which point I gave up). Effectively, it might as well not exist on the web.