How to make a successful new wiki: Difference between revisions

It's easy to set up a bare-bones wiki installation on a web site.

It's hard - much more difficult than you probably think - to take the next steps of:

• protecting from spam and vandalism
• continuing to develop the site
• finding content
• creating community
• managing the content for quality and structure
• building the infrastructure: templates, categories, help pages, policy/guideline/procedure pages, etc. to foster productive collaboration

These things take a huge amount of collective work.

It is a rare community that has even one obsessive wiki admin/contributor, let alone the half dozen or more that are needed to make a successful wiki.

If they come, will they edit?

• It is possible to get editors - e.g. Appropedia and Greenlivingpedia have had a large number of contributions. Appropedia has had 1,121,611 edits since May 2006 (increasing over time) and page views.
• Appropedia has had 129 views per edit; Greenlivingpedia has had 157. On the English Wikipedia about 0.02% of the unique visitors actually edit,^[1] and yet it is extremely active and comprehensive. With these figures, a community-wide or a global wiki clearly has a much better chance. A locally based wiki will at best be moderately successful, and that only if there is someone very committed to editing the wiki.
• The large comparison table of wikis at Green wikis and development wikis^[2] shows a profusion of wikis, but a high proportion of them are inactive. Only a very small number have grown to a useful resource, mainly thanks to the dedication of a small, committed group of people - sometimes it is just one committed person, which is enough to create something useful but it is often not very visible, and does not contribute to encouraging broader collaboration by the viewers (to be precise, that tiny proportion of a large number of viewers).

Conclusion: Your wiki needs to engage with a very large number of people to get a significant absolute number of contributors. This is a classic manifestation of the Pareto principle,^W also known as the law of the vital few.

How successful wikis started

• Wikipedia started as a commercial effort, only later being made a non-profit.^W

• wikiHow is commercially operated, with paid staff.
• Appropedia has a core of a number of people who work on the site daily, and academics who have their students (a large number in total) engaged with creating content on Appropedia (see Appropedia:Learning institutions on Appropedia).

Think globally - collaborate don't compete

Collaboration and competition are both powerful creative forces in nature and society. They each have their place - but the nature of wikis is radical collaboration.

See Permaculture wiki #Think globally: A call to collaboration

See also Green wiki, Appropriate technology wiki and Wiki synergy.

Advice from Jimmy Wales

Jimmy Wales, the co-founder of Wikipedia, lists five elements he considers essential to the success of a large-scale collaboration:^[3]

1. Mechanisms for effective collaboration (wiki software provides revision control, ability to revert unconstructive edits; but there must be a dedicated community of users to continuously monitor a wiki).
2. Online identities (pseudo-identities are fine as long as they are stable).
3. Shared vision. The community of participants must share the same vision of what they are trying to build.
4. Flat hierarchies, with the fewest possible barriers to participation.
5. Speed.

See also

• Yet another wiki
• Ingredients of a successful commons
• User:Teratornis/Template porting: theory and practice

Notes