StigmergicWeb

Stephen commented on Quentin D’Souza’s post regarding building a wiki community (originally from Danny Horn of Muppet Wiki).

Wikipedia, he says, is not just a larger wiki with a larger contributor base than a small wiki with a group of 50 contributors (such as Muppet Wiki). Wikipedia can control content by having a large base of contributors/editors (about 43 000 according to Danny). Having such a large pool of eyeballs to keep watch on the content can spot and erase vandalism quite quickly. How can a smaller wiki prevent vandalism and spamming?

A small wiki is different from a big wiki, not just in amount of content or number of contributors. The relationship between the contributors is also different. The contributors of Wikipedia probably don’t know much about each other - 43 000 is way way bigger than Dunbar’s number. In a smaller wiki, contributors have the chance to know of all the other contributors. Muppet Wiki has a policy (community value?) that contributing members must have a user name. Enforcing a user name might seem contrary to the wiki way, but it serves its purpose within a small wiki:

The User Name policy helps to weed out vandals and creeps — and it also helps to build communication and trust. Having a stable identity makes communication possible. Contributors with user names build a record of contributions, and a reputation. If the community as a whole knows that a particular contributor is trustworthy, then that can influence how conflicts get resolved. You need a stable identity to earn people’s trust. Allowing people to sign in with a random string of numbers breaks down the community’s sense of trust and common goals. You can’t build a strong team of trustworthy colleagues that also includes shadowy, faceless strangers.

One word that keeps appearing in that description is trust. Rick Schwier has done some research on online communities, and one of his findings is that the most important element by far in an online community is trust. Trust is the glue that holds any community together. It is especially important in online communities because it is the key form of social capital. Trust is what Muppet Wiki has that Wikipedia does not, at least not in the same degree.

In something the scale of Wikipedia where there are thousands of contributors, the degree of trust between contributors is going to be limited. It may be an effective model for managing a large corpus of content, but it cannot be truly described as a community. Muppet Wiki is much smaller. There is trust between the contributors. Membership is limited so that those whose behaviour is contrary to the policy of the wiki will not be allowed to join the group. Muppet Wiki is a true community. In a smaller wiki, the quality of the content is maintained not by the overwhelming numbers of contributors. It is maintained by the trust that contributors - the members of the community - have for the community goal (information about Muppets - I can definitely respect that as being a worthy goal) and for each other.

This entry was posted on Monday, June 4th, 2007 at 11:23 and is filed under wikis, online community. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.