From
nearly the first moment the term “Web 2.0” was coined,
people have been speculating endlessly about “Web 3.0.” What does the future hold for
the Web? What is the next big thing?
I think we should slow
down. We are still very much at the beginning of Web 2.0, which I define as a
medium marked less by individual production (home pages) than by collaborative
production (wikis, social networks, etc.). Although
Wikipedia is massively popular, it represents only a fraction of what is
possible.
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Imagine walking into
a traditional library. Gaze around at all the books. The shelf with the
encyclopedias contains only a tiny fraction of all the works in the library.
It’s the same with Wikipedia. So at Wikia, the Web hosting service I set up in
2004, we are now working on building the rest of the library. The encyclopedia
(in English, at least) is already fairly comprehensive. Now people are moving
on to other types of work: humor, political activism, gaming guides, and more.
Even this is only scratching the surface. Our search project will allow mass
collaboration on the creation of search results. Projects that others are
working on will allow mass collaboration on video production, music, and more.
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Consider–as one
imaginary example–the production of a documentary film about social attitudes
to global warming in different cultures around the world. For a traditional
film crew to conduct hundreds of “person in the street” interviews worldwide
and edit them together into a compelling narrative would be incredibly
expensive, requiring months of travel.
But a community of
thoughtful people on the Internet would require only some organization and
leadership, because the tools are already widely distributed. The movement from
individual video production (as in most of what appears on YouTube today) to
collaborative video production is becoming possible with the development of
collaborative video-editing tools.
The Wikipedia model may
even extend to solving problems afflicting the Internet itself (see “The
Web’s Dark Energy” by Jonathan Zittrain). The spread of
worms, viruses, and spam disrupts the Internet, but tight security measures
threaten what is good about the medium. Rather than confronting a stark choice
between anarchy and top-down control, we may find that communal efforts can
yield a reasonable solution.
Jimmy Wales is the cocreator of Wikipedia
and founder of wikia, a web hosting service.
