Over the past few years, the wiki has emerged as an information superpower, popularized by Wikipedia and its unique online community strategy. Now, wikipages.com intends to do the same thing with regard to business directories.

Wikipages.com is an online business directory focused on New York City, for the time being. Born a little over a year ago, Wikipages already has over one thousand entries for NYC and several for other major US cities. Using MediaWiki software, the website includes discussion pages and a community portal page where anyone can add their input.

The site has connections to the blogosphere, from its own blog, blog.wikipages.com, and nyc.metblogs.com, where Wikipages co-founder Tracey Donvito blogs regularly. Wikipages has the potential to expand as people join its community. While still in the beginning stage, this growing site is part of the ongoing wiki trend.

In a way, wikis bring a democratic element to a website. In the future, more wikis and other open source technologies could replace the former totalitarian website methods. Wikis have the advantage of displaying a whole community’s knowledge, rather than that of just a few select people. Easy to use and edit, wikis have rapidly increased in popularity in a short timespan.

But for it to be effective, Wikipages.com needs more to be involved its community. With a strong community, wikipages will utilize its democratic platform to create a constantly-growing, easily-changeable source of information. As of the moment, they have approximately 1,000 businesses listed all within NYC and centered around three communities: Astoria, Queens; Greenwich Village, Manhattan; and the Financial District, Manhattan.

Given Wikipedia’s meteoric success in recent years, Wikipages seems promising. But they are not without criticism. According to an article by Allen Stern in CenterNetworks.com, their design and interface may need some improvement for it to be taken seriously.

This throw up a wiki and use Google ads to monetize  is really getting boring, wrote Stern. I see it a lot and it just always makes me wonder if it’s a real business. Tracey and Ben are very passionate about their idea and it seems like it could have some traction (will require a lot of work) and I think people would take it much more seriously if it looked like a Web site not a out-of-the-box Wiki software.

Other concerns center around their competition against Yelp and Google. As I reported in this blog recently, Google has started a program to pay people to create pages for local businesses.

Can Wikipages (and the other business directories) afford to compete? asks Stern. The answer is obviously no, so I think it’s important that [Wikipages] continue to innovate. They need to stay a step ahead of Google in terms of their offering. What about video interviews of the business owners? What about video interviews with customers? Video is hot, and local is not utilizing it yet.