It's easy to set up a 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
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 1,122,586 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 that 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.
How successful wikis started
- 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.
Notes
- ↑ For Appropedia statistics see Special:Statistics; for Greenlivingpedia see Greenlivingpedia:Special:Statistics; and for Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects see User:Stu/comScore data on Wikimedia (the figures are obtained in a different way since the Wikimedia view counters are turned off).
- ↑ The initial comparison was carred out as part of a study for Akvo and UNESCO-IHE, on collaboration in appropriate technology and related areas.