successful community collaboration using wikis
DESCRIPTION
How successful wikis are built, with examples from Wikipedia and Wikia. Angela Beesley's presentation at Web Directions South, Sydney, 27 September 2007.TRANSCRIPT
Angela Beesley
27 September, 2007
Successful Community Collaboration using
Wikis
A wiki is...
...a website that you can edit....
The Wikimedia Foundation
Imagine a world where every person has free access to
the sum of all human knowledge
WikipediaWikipedia
•Started in 2001
•9th most visited website
•Created by volunteers
•Openly editable
•Freely licensed
•230 languages
•Run by a non-profit
Wikipedia English Wikipedia
•5.4 million editors
•2 million articles
•10 million pages
Wikipedia is a community
Wikimania 2007, TaipeiCC-BY-SA. Alex S.H. Lin
Wikipedia is a community
with 5.4 million registered users
Wikimania 2007, TaipeiCC-BY-SA. Alex S.H. Lin
Wikipedia is a community
with 5.4 million registered users
collaborating in the creation of the world’s largest encyclopedia.
Wikimania 2007, TaipeiCC-BY-SA. Alex S.H. Lin
Can you trust user-generated
content?
Trusting the process
• Open to correction and improvement• Everything is reversible• Changes are transparent• Poor content is flagged
Every edit is logged
Every edit is loggedUser-run bots highlight potential “bad edits”
Tagging of problematic content
The wiki community• Working towards a shared goal• Collaboration
• Welcoming to newcomers
• Rewarding to old-timers
• Dispute resolution processes
Dispute resolution
Wikipedia is the encyclopedia, Wikia is the rest of the library.
Wikia Gaming Network
250,000 articles
MediaWikiOpen Source wiki software application
developed for Wikipedia
Social tools
Promotion
Widgets
Integration with third-party tools
Wikitext• Markup language
• Simplified alternative to HTML
• No standards
Easy to learn, hard to master
WoWWiki.com
Properties of successful wikis
Advantages of wikis
Internal uses of wikis
External uses of wikis
Starting a wiki: hosted or self-installed
• Encourage new editors
• Provide editing suggestions
• Make editing sound easy
Examples from three top wikis...
Wiki adoption
Wiki adoption
Wiki adoption
Wiki adoption
How could you use a wiki?
