Last week I got to hear a great presentation from Wikipedia programmer Brandon Harris. His talk was part of the class that I’m taking at Stanford on building online communities. You’ll recognize Brandon from the recent Wikipedia fundraising appeals:
He was also the designer of the ominous Wikipedia landing page from several weeks ago when Wikipedia shut down to protest the S.O.P.A. legislation before Congress:
The bulk of Brandon’s talk was about how Wikipedia had taken a backwards approach to building its site and is now in a difficult position. Wikipedia’s popularity has been driven by user participation and the tireless work of editors or “Wikipedians” who curate and add content to the site. However, the founders of Wikipedia focused on building the structure of the site, while neglecting community building. While the Wikipedia community developed organically, it lacks the features and feel of popular social media sites that we all use. The downside of this omission has been that the numbers of active Wikipedians is declining. With less people to edit the site, a backlog of new information and spam could eventually be overwhelming. The antidote to this is to build up the Wikipedia community and encourage new members to actively participate as editors rather than just consumers of information.
Wikipedia is the #5 most visited site on the internet. I’ve used it to find information hundreds of times. As someone who has never edited or written a Wikipedia article, Brandon’s talk inspired me to give it a shot. I’ll do a future post on the technical aspects of editing Wikipedia, but in the meantime
here’s some more info for you.
