#3 Battle with Wikipedia – Gen Z is not Gen C
November 8, 2008 by Jake Pearce
Hi there!
Firstly let me declare my undying love for Wikipedia – but even deep lovers have big tiffs and Wikipedia have got it wrong. Leading academics and commentators have stated Gen C is a state of mind rather than a demographic. Right now Gen Z is presented as a demographic on Wikipedia and lumped in with Gen C. This is like saying all Harley Davidson (state of mind) lovers are Boomers.
I know Wikipedia has often been criticised for being ‘inaccurate’ yet, as I learned at a business convention the other day, Wikipedia has less inaccuracies than the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Why? Well, Wikipedia’s mistakes can be changed quickly – in a keystroke – while with the encyclopaedia Britannica, you are waiting for the next print run.
Simon Young and myself first posted a Gen C Wikipedia entry about 2 years ago – which summarised all the newspapers, educators and sources who had used the term. At that time there was no consensus on what the term Gen C stood for and so numerous “Cs” were all contenders e.g.
Content, communicate, creativity, channel, community, competition, compost, “children of the 1930’s”, celebrity, co-creators and cusper generation!
In the Wiki post, we quite clearly stated that all the data pointed to Gen C or digital natives being people of different ages who actively had an affiliation for the digital world – this was based on our data trawl of the ‘deep web’ (99% that can’t be seen by Google) on Generation C courtesy of Bridge Ellis http://www.bridgeellis.com
Add to this, the Consultaglobal data – which was published in Business week from a Forrester Report June 2007 – showed a strong use of different digital mediums across age groups with a skew towards younger people, as you’d expect:
http://consultaglobal.wordpress.com/2007/06/11/businessweek-web-strategies-that-cater-to-customers/
Wikipedia, quite rightly wants enough evidence from ‘established’ media/academics that something exists. The ‘meme’ Generation C is very much out there used by everyone from the Wall Street Journal, to established academics, to leading social media gurus (Ahonen and Moore) who are teaching about it at Oxford University in December this year:
http://www.sociallyminded.co.uk/2008/10/alan-moore-tomi-ahonen-and-me-at-oxford-university-dec-3-4/
Currently Gen C is cited under Gen Z which is defined on Wiki as:
“Generation Z is the generation of people living in Western or First World cultures that follows Generation Y. According to Strauss and Howe the generation cohort begins in 2001.“
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_Z
In order to get this one changed – I am going to stir things up a bit on Wiki. Please join me in the discussion to get this Wiki entry right – we need to have a Gen C page separate from Gen Z.
Please go to and let Wiki know it’s time to re-route the Gen C specific page back to. I will be going to war tomorrow, I invite you to join me.
So Wikipedia – are you ready to play?
Comments
6 Responses to “#3 Battle with Wikipedia – Gen Z is not Gen C”
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Strikes me "C" stands for "code"
Sian
thanks for the comment – what makes you say code? that’s interesting can you elaborate?
Jake
I think you are right that Gen C should have it’s own wiki page – how do you go about making this happen. It’s all wrong coz Gen Z seems way narrower than Gen C. Good luck!
Hi, good post. I have been wondering about this issue,so thanks for posting.
Hi there
Is there anything in particular you wanted to explore further? I am doing some more work on Gen C, Z etc right now. All ideas and input very welcome.
Kindest
Jake
I have been busy – I am going to put the wiki battle up my list of priorities – I always do waht I say – even if it is a little slowly on occcasion – thanks for the support!!!