Social Networking for Business: Choosing the Right Tools and Resources to Fit Your Needs

3. Leadership in Social Environments

Jimmy Wales is famous for founding Wikipedia, the largest free encyclopedia on the Web. But fewer people recall his project before that, Nupedia, which had a similar goal of providing encyclopedia content for free on the Internet. Wikipedia’s success is evident in its millions of users and entries, and in supporting 55 languages as varied as Vietnamese, Arabic, and Russian, all submitted by volunteers across the Internet. Its success might even have helped shutter Microsoft’s MSN Encarta, a leading commercial competitor.¹ By the time Wales’s Nupedia effort closed down after about three years of operation, the site had 24 published articles, with 74 others in review.² By comparison, Wikipedia reached about ...