Last week saw the 15th anniversary of one of the original and best examples of crowdsourcing made possible by the wonderful world of the web – the Wikipedia.

It wasn't the first online encyclopedia by any means - but it is an interesting case study on how something took on the might of Microsoft and comprehensively won (who remembers Encarta?). The financials and funding model are dramatically different to the commercials around a for-profit corporate product like Encarta, but the biggest difference was its unique model of crowdsourced curation and control of content.