Wikipedia: Website Killer

A few years back I launched a small website titled "The Theater Guide." The site was moderately succesful for a first time web publisher, coded by hand and published without the aid of any blog software. It was good enough to be plagarized and to win a prize. That was almost seven years ago.

The Theater Guide was essentially a resource I had written including information about community theater. At the time, the internet was pretty bare when it came to informaton about theater; theater geeks were simply not web geeks. I was not a professional, but I'd like to think most of the information presented on the site was useful to the people who happened to come across it. That was then.

Now of course, everything I had published on the site can easily be researched on Wikipedia. Compare for instance, the Wikipedia entry on stage lighting to a similar page on my guide. Not only is the Wikipedia entry more extensive, but offers links to other areas. The best part is, Wikipedia is being edited by hundreds of thousands of people, providing collective knowledge rather than the limited knowledge of a single publisher. All of this is obvious.

But what this does mean is that sites like my former Theater Guide have a lot less relevance. Small publishers are less necessary today then before Wikipedia. This is in part why my old site has been moved to an archive and I no longer support it. Better information is produced for far less effort then I could devote to expanding the theater guide.

Indeed, Wikipedia has meant a rich assortment of information is freely available on the internet tubes, but it also means small time web publishers must work harder to provide any sort of innovative service.