[Wikimedia-l] Any studies on economic impact of community-produced open data?

[Chris Keating]

>
> One thing that came up in discussion was whether or not anyone has ever
> done any economic impact studies on Wikipedia and other community-produced
> open data and open content projects (OpenStreetMap, other Wikimedia
> projects etc.)? If civic society groups like Wikimedians,
> OpenStreetMappers, MySociety.org people etc. want to convince governments
> to put more data out, it'd be helpful to show the economic effects of this,
> or to have people who are trying to convince government to put the data out
> to have access to this kind of information so they can make better
> decisions (cue cynicism here).
>

There is a basic problem here in that it's difficult to account for
non-traded goods. Since no-one pays for Wikipedia, the value to the economy
appears to be zero.

An alternative methodology would be to account for the value that would be
required to replace Wikipedia if it didn't exist. As an example of this
methodology you could take the traded price of a Wikipedia substitute (e.g.
Britannica Online is £50 a year) and multiply that by the number of users,
which I'd estimate at 30 million in the UK. So the hidden value to the UK
economy of Wikipedia could be as high as £1.5 billion every year....

But this might not be the most helpful answer to you. :-)

Chris