system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
Is it possible to quantify the impact of Wikipedia the world economy?
gpt
Sure, but probably it can't be done well. Probably, the most reasonable approach to doing something like what you may be asking about would involve sorting out the following:

1. How valuable is Wikipedia to people as a consumption good? That is, how much is it worth as a thing people browse and look things up in for fun or for their hobbies or whatever else?
* How value is Wikipedia as a capital good? That is, how valuable is it to businesses, governments, researchers, etc. strictly as a tool used to help people do work stuff? Probably a good idea to make these calculations net of time people waste browsing it at work.
* How much does Wikipedia cost to create? Think server costs, but also time spent by people editing it. 

You can probably do a pretty good job of getting at the cost side of the ledger here, at number (3). But (1) and (2) are the hard part: you can make your own assumptions, you can survey people about what they think they'd pay for Wikipedia if it wasn't free, you can extrapolate from whatever you learn from the select circumstances where you can nail down an answer (e.g. maybe you can run an experiment in some country with limited internet/wikipedia access and randomly give some businesses access to Wikipedia and others not, to see whether / by how much wikipedia recipients perform better), etc. But ultimately, you probably can't get the true number.

For an added layer of complexity, there is the question of Wikipedia vs what. Realistically, you can't credit Wikipedia either all of the benefits or costs of its existence. It is probably true that Wikipedia has displaced some purchasing of encyclopedias and made things tough for at least some information provider / encyclopedia companies. But what that means is that some people and companies receiving benefits from wikipedia probably would have received similar benefits from the encyclopedia britannica, or whatever other company. And, on net, some of the labor we've devoted as a society to making wikipedia has freed up labor that otherwise would have been spent on making encyclopedias for some other company. So, this adds a bonus layer of irritation to efforts at quantifying wikipedia's impact, however defined..