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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Offlist chat about the recent discussions on systemic gender bias in Wikipedia made it clear that a number of women were not comfortable contributing to the conversation there. In response to this, I have created WikiChix, a wiki and mailing list for female wiki editors to discuss issues of gender bias in wikis, to find ways of encouraging more female editors, and just as a place that females can feel more comfortable posting to.
This new community is named after, and inspired by, LinuxChix, the women-oriented community for Linux users.
If you are female and interested in wikis, I would like to encourage you to join the mailing list.
Some of the pages on the wiki are openly editable, so even if you’re not female, you are welcome to post your comments.
The FAQs for related communities answer a lot of questions about why this was created, so please read those for more information until we have our own FAQ.
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Wikia has passed a new milestone of 20 featured wikis. These wikis are nominated and voted on by the Wikia community and then featured on the home page for around a month. Featured wikis serve as good examples for the new wikis to learn from. For example, the wiki might show great support for newcomers, fast membership growth, a creative use of categories, innovative templates, or the best use of various wiki techniques and practices. Thanks to CocoaZen, who has been doing a great job of organising the featured wiki process since it started in early 2005.
Here is Wikia’s official top 20, from the most recent to the oldest:
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In collaboration with IBM, The University of Arizona is launching what looks like a very interesting course on Managing Online Communities. Rawn Shah writes on the course’s wiki that it will cover “the needs, issues, and operations behind running social software systems in a business environment”. It would be interesting to know how managing a community in that sort of environment differs from the public environment of running a Wikia site. Wikia are trying to build up best practices on the Central Wikia, with tips for wiki founders on building, promoting, and maintaining their wikis, but it’s based only on our own experiences with Wikipedia (Wikia staff now have over 40 years Wikipedia experience between them!) and not on any formal courses such as this one.
The reading list for the course in interesting too - there’s no one set textbook, but instead includes books I’ve been meaning to read and not gotten round to yet, like Chris Anderson’s “The Long Tail” and James Surowiecki’s “The Wisdom of Crowds“.
Unlike Harvard Law School’s course “CyberOne: Law in the Court of Public Opinion” where virtual attendees can participate via blogs, wikis, and Second Life, (related post), you’d need to be in Arizona to participate in this one. Hopefully Wikimedia’s newest project, Wikiversity, will provide something similar in the not too distant future. Wikibooks has a very rough beginning to something like this in its “Wiki Science” section.
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Wikia
WikiChix
Freedom defined
