Wikipedia, the lazy websurfer’s version of “research”, is getting some competition. Citizendium is an attempt to reboot the collaborative online encyclopedia concept, with the qualification of non-anonymous contributors to instill greater accountability.

I’ve been critical of Wikipedia from the moment I learned of it, which is about the time it started exploding in popularity. Since Citizendium, which just launched, is just another wiki-based attempt at reference compilation, I see it as being not much more reliable a source, even with the attempt to address its predecessor’s shortcomings.

In fact, because Citizendium’s birth comes amid a soap-operaish dispute over founder Larry Sanger’s cred as a Wikipedia co-founder, I foresee massive amounts of wiki-warfare between the two sites in the near term. That’s going to manifest itself in acolytes on both sides carrying out defacements on each others’ sites, in attempts to discredit the other side and generally keep the volunteer vanguard busy and pissy. Paradoxically, this wiki-knowledge competition’s going to wind up doing more damage to the concept, rather than reinforce any public confidence in it.

Moreover, ultimately neither Wikipedia nor Citizendium is going to have much control over which will emerge as the more popular site. The truth is that Google will.

How did the search behemoth get into this? Simple. A dirty little secret about Wikipedia is that its popularity and traffic have little to do with how relevant or reliable its content is. Rather, its search-engine optimization is disproportionately responsible for its pre-eminent position.

Consider the basic URL structure of a Wikipedia entry:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horse

It’s very straightforward: Domain name, a directory (/wiki/), and a direct subdirectory (/Horse). Pair that with matching pertinent content in the page’s body text, and you wind up with the top-ranked result on a Google search. And since the majority of Web searchers click on the top result, in a wishful thought that this represents the “best” information source, you get the maximum number of clickthroughs.

That’s the heart of it, really. Had Jimmy Wales devised a more complex URL permalink structure for his site — perhaps encoded in numerals — I can guarantee that Wikipedia never would have extended beyond a limited circle of enthusiasts. In a real sense, Google granted Wikipedia its ubiquity.

And that lesson isn’t lost on Sanger. He’s set up Citizendium’s URLs the same way:

http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/Horse

So Google will start assigning a high level of relevance to those permalinks as well. Wikipedia’s links will still come out higher in the short term, owing to their longer history and greater number of referring links (neither of which are deciding factors in Google’s ranking algorithm, but do carry considerable weight). But over time, that can even out. At that stage, whichever site ends up being more Google-friendly will gain the upper hand.

Upshot: All this will ultimately junk the wiki model for organizing online data. Can’t say I’ll be crying over it. I will be curious to see what supplants this mess, though.