Veropedia and the Wikipedia mine
A year ago, I wondered "why no devious entrepreneurs have made a concerted effort to take Wikipedia's content, which is of course free to be reused in any way, and reformat and rebrand it as an attractive commercial site." Why not mine Wikipedia's unexploited commercial value?
Context & Ripple Effects
Nicholas Carr posed the question a year ago — alongside his musing on why online advertising provokes such hostility — when he asked why no devious entrepreneur had made a concerted effort to mine Wikipedia's unexploited commercial value. Veropedia is the first serious answer: it takes Wikipedia's freely reusable text and reformats and rebrands it as an attractive commercial reference site.
What makes the move potent is position, not content: by mid-2007 Wikipedia was the top Google result for queries as diverse as evolution, Iraq, Gordon Brown and loneliness, meaning whoever wraps that content in a better-branded package is competing for some of the most valuable search real estate on the web.
First-order effects
- Veropedia converts a public good into a private property play overnight — same text, new brand, and a direct claim on the search traffic Wikipedia currently captures.
- Wikipedia loses nothing under its license but gains a competitor for its own audience, since every Veropedia entry vies with the original for identical query slots.
Second-order effects
- If Veropedia demonstrates the model pays, imitators will strip-mine other freely licensed corpora, shifting the scarce asset from content itself to curation, branding and trust.
- The community's instincts point the other way: Wikipedia banned Overstock.com in September over alleged abuse and spam, showing editors already police commercial exploitation at the editing layer — repackaging at the presentation layer tests how far that enforcement will reach.
Third-order effects
- Volunteer-created commons content becomes an extractable input for commercial intermediaries, sharpening the structural question of whether Wikimedia should capture that value itself or leave it to whoever wraps the content fastest.
The trend: Free-licensed commons like Wikipedia are turning into raw material for intermediary businesses that rebrand volunteer labor as proprietary-feeling commercial products.