I’ve just put the results of a small scale study Wikia carried out last year on the wiki. The study aimed to find out how many of our page views were from logged in users compared to people who were not logged in. We were testing out Jakob Nielsen’s statement that “90% of users are lurkers who never contribute“.
Jacob was exactly right. Sampling 1% of 3.5 million page views across all Wikia sites on one day in November 2006 showed that 90% of readers were not logged in.
There were a couple of interesting exceptions amongst our most popular wikis. At Star Wars Fanon, 70% of page views were from logged in users. The Spanking Art Wikia was at the other end of scale, where logged in users account for only 1% of page views. Presumably those interested in Star Wars Fanon are already involved in a Star Wars community and they’re visiting the wiki because they want to both read and write this fan-fiction. People looking for pictures of spanking, on the other hand, probably aren’t there because they want to join a community. Both are popular wikis in terms of page views, but the Star Wars Fanon one is much more successful in terms of what Wikia is trying to do, which is build wiki-based communities, not simply attract uninvolved visitors. It’s a very noticeable difference to Wikia’s community team since Star Wars Fanon is a demanding wiki that often needs our attention, whereas we rarely hear from any users of the Spanking Art wiki despite its popularity in terms of pure traffic numbers.
I’m hoping that by publishing the stats, we’ll encourage the communities to think about how they can get people to feel more involved with their wiki and to decrease the “participation inequality” that Jakob Nielsen talks about. Ways that he suggests to do that are making it easier to contribute, making participation a side effect, letting users build their contributions by modifying existing templates rather than creating complete entities, rewarding participants for contributing, and promoting quality contributors. Now to figure out how to apply these ideas to 2000 very different wikis…
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Wikia is offering to host wiki.com communities at no charge and to provide support for users who wish to transition away from wiki.com.
A user of wiki.com (not wikia.com) has said in a comment at TechCrunch that he has received an email from John Gotts saying that all wikis on wiki.com will be removed this week. Though two different people have written to Wikia saying the same thing, I’ve been unable to confirm whether this is true. In case it is, Wikia is offering all wiki.com users a new home at Wikia.
See our new wiki at rescued.wikia.com for options, details on how Wikia is different from wiki.com and information for wiki.com users on how to move to Wikia.
If you are a user of wiki.com, we would love to help you find a new home. Visit “moving to Wikia”.
Update: Mindtouch have confirmed that Wiki.com will shut down within a week but the content of these sites will be made available on a new domain in future. See the Message from Mindtouch on the rescued wiki.
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Today, January 15th, is Wikipedia’s sixth birthday, and also the final day of the Wikimedia Foundation’s Fundraising Drive.
So far, the total raised is $980,903. Less than $20,000 to go to make a million dollars.
If you haven’t donated yet, give Wikipedia a birthday present and contribute towards its reliability and sustainability.
Donate here!
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As reported by the New York Times and Wall Street Journal, Eric Jackson is aiming “to foment a Yahoo Inc. shareholder insurrection using the democratizing tools of the social Web.” On his blog, Eric introduced his plan by saying that “Yahoo! is drifting; and its board and management have been too slow to act to this fundamental problem.” He calls on activist shareholders to get join him in collaboratively creating a “Plan B” for Yahoo. The plan is now editable on a new Wikia site: the Unofficial Yahoo Wiki at yahoo.wikia.com. Get involved by editing the plan or add your comments on the discussion page.
Another very new wiki at Wikia is the Apple iPhone Wiki, a place for Apple fans to document the features of the iPhone and to link to and create both documentation and reviews of the product. Get involved by following a red link from the features page to create a new article.
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The Electronic Frontier Foundation are defending a wiki editor’s right to link to an external site. This is the EFF’s first wiki case according to Larry Lessig.
Fred von Lohmann, Senior Intellectual Property Attorney of the EFF, is defending the rights of an anonymous citizen-journalist to link from the public Zyprexa PBWiki to copies of leaked Eli Lilly documents. The documents are related to the controversial prescription drug Zyprexa and, according to the New York Times, show that the company intentionally downplayed the drug’s side effects.
Related links:
Update: 13 February: “Eli Lilly Loses Effort to Censor Zyprexa Documents Off the Internet” – the judge rescinded the injunction against the wiki.
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Wikia
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