WIKIPEDIA

Case of Wikipedia

Introduction1

Overview of the Company1

Discussion2

Strategic Capability of Wikipedia2

Resource Based View3

Resources3

Intangible Resources4

Competencies4

Strategic Capabilities and Competitive Advantage5

Value5

Rarity5

Inimitability6

Non-Substitutability6

SWOT Analysis7

Strength7

Weakness7

Threat8

Opportunities8

Complexity Theory9

Chaos Theory10

Conclusion10

References12

Case of Wikipedia

Introduction

Overview of the Company

Wikipedia was launched by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger on January 15, 2001. It was not the first offering in the online industry for encyclopedia. Encarta.com was introduced by Microsoft in 1993 which was followed by the online version of Britannica which is the UK publisher of learning and knowledge products in 1995. There are a small portion of articles that are available for free and in order to access the full articles with proper reference information in the advertising free environment, a person has to pay an annual subscription for premier membership. In contrast, the access to Wikipedia is available for anyone who has an internet access without any types of charges in the form of distracting advertisements or fees.

In 2009, Microsoft announced that the offering of Encarta did not match the increasingly popular Wikipedia due to which it will exit from the online encyclopedia industry by the end of year. Currently, Encarta is an online thesaurus, dictionary and translator of five different languages. For Britannica, the daily traffic is moving towards Wikipedia.

Its core mission can be considered as free knowledge for the free minds. The mission of Wikipedia to free knowledge from the limitations of traditional copyright which is most of the time misinterpreted in terms of promoting the illegal piracy of the published work. Its mission is focused on promoting free thinking along with unrestricted learning while protecting the commercial and intellectual interests of author by the requirement to recognize the original authorship. Its articles are protected under the joint licenses of GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL) and Creative Commons Attribution-Sharealike 3.0 Unported License. Through this co-license, the users of Wikipedia are allowed to use, cope and update the articles with more relevant information, examples and facts to promote viral learning and creativity till they are not for the commercial purposes and the authors are also required to give proper acknowledgement and credit of the work. When the articles on Wikipedia become commercially viable, a separate commercial agreement is required between the parties who have improved the original work and the original authors. Through this form of licensing, it can develop a win-win situation through the removal of limitations on the global effort to increase the human knowledge and finding new applications for the theory or product along with crediting the original authorship and protection of the financial interest s and intellectual integrity of the original authors.

It was first noticed by Slashdot which is a website that reports free software technology news. The pages of Wikipedia are consistently returned as the most relevant answers to the searches. It is able to develop a new user brand through its offering being placed in the top 5 results on various search engines. Users are able to find Wikipedia by clicking on one of the top entries which are returned by popular search ...