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Which Game is Wikipedia playing

  • 13 October 2021
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As part of the North Star Playbook it is suggested to discuss in the product team about the game (Attention, Transaction and Productivity) they are playing. 

I have been asked which game Wikipedia is playing and I have collected arguments for each one of the games: I am interested to hear your opinion about which one of the three you think wikipedia is actually playing.

Attention Game: Wikipedia is a free and community based knowledge sharing platform. The biggest value they bring is to provide a neutral alternative information source that is not driven by profit or politics and therefore provides a general level of security agains manipulation and propaganda. The more people know about that service the powerful it becomes and the more valuable it is. A user doesn’t even need to look anything up in wikipedia - just the fact that there is such a control instance regulates the whole information market. Also the fact that wikipedia is financially based on donations could promote the idea that they play the attention game.

Transaction: Wikipedia is an information transaction service. The users provide knowledge and continues quality control and in return they can receive information for themselves. This is basically an transaction of information and the value is created by each transaction.

Productivity: Wikipedia doesn’t contain any information that is special to their database. All the information are public knowledge and it is just a place were you can get access faster than researching the internet yourself. It’s about making the access to public information more productive. If the productivity of the user grows also wikipedia grows.

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Best answer by Saish Redkar 14 October 2021, 17:38

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Hi @Matzus  These are all very good points you make! While I am not sure myself which to choose, I personally have been persuaded by your argument for attention game and that is the one I would choose. They’re one of the, if not THE, largest largest online source for information. The customers benefit from Wikipedia the more time they spend their and the more information customers share amongst each other.  Customer use wikipedia to spend time researching and the more they research and spend time on the product, the better for Wikipedia. So I would agree with you that this is more than likely an attention game.

 

However, that’s my own personal two cents. However, I’d be curious what others think. @Saish Redkar ! Are you around? :) What do you think?

 

Kind Regards,

Denis

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Interesting topic, @Matzus ! 

I’m going to resonate with @Denis Holmes’s reply here. Attention game it is for Wikipedia!

The more I read a wikipedia page, the more curious I get to click on those hyperlinked texts :wink: to drive the knowledge exploration in context of that piece of information. This definitely keeps the user engaged and increases their time spent on the website. And the amount of information stored/edited in there always gets bigger and bigger.

I wouldn’t bat for transaction to be specific since it doesn’t really reflect any sort of tangible aspect to that extent in context of the playbook. 

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