I believe I can add something useful to this conversation.
Background: I noticed Wikipedia when it was a relatively new project. I was one of the first registered users of Czech Wikipedia (# 7), one fo the first builders of the Czech community, registered the Czech domain, and gradually worked in different functions suchas an administrator, member of the arbitration committee, checkuser, etc … I was also a founding member of the Czech Wikimedia Chapter.
Since then, I have been following various attempts to compete with Wikipedia (does anyone remember e.g. Google Knol?) And so far in all cases I expected the projects will fail.
Why? Because IMO essential factor behind the success of Wikipedia is the “community design” that is in the background, and which provides incentives to content creators. Common lore it something likeeveryone can edit Wikipedia, and the encyclopedia is written by mostly random crowd of site visitors who click the edit button. That’s complete nonsense. Wikipedia was written mostly by a dedicated community of volunteers with complex internal organization, hierarchies, social rewards, and the possibility of gaining power.
Much of what I did at the begining cz.wiki was translations of various documents about community norms, implementation of different processes, feedbacks, dispute resolution, etc. The community design goals are various, e.g. you want positive feedback loops, you dont want editors to bite each other, you want the community to be meritocratic, and so on. It’s far from obvious how to design such system.
Of course, with most wikipedists, somewhere in the background is an altruistic motivation to help with the aggregation of human knowledge and create something like Encyclopedia Galactica. But on a day-to-day basis, what helps keepeing peeple motivated is working with other dedicated people, receiving feedback, beeing able to see others interacting with your edits and improving further, and even some forms of conflicts . Also valuable editing leads to increasing your weight in the community, you can gain various social goods, responsibility, various functions, and of course power.
Btw the power of senior Wikipedia users is not negligible at all. If we simplify it to counting money, you can imagine what is the value at stake depending on the content of the first page of Google results on many topics, and how much power Google has controlling it. Wikipedia has less influence, but still a lot of influence.
So to summarize, what I see in this portmortem (thanks for wrting it!) from my perspective is almost complete lack of “community design” and thinking about editor motivations. (Community design is different from user aquisiton.)
We did some work on the community design. That’s what Eric Bruylant did part time (slack channel, writing guidelines, etc..). He worked with the Wikipedia community (and other forums) in the past, so he certainly had the right experience. But overall I agree with your sentiment.
Thanks Jan, this was useful. I had a vague sense that Wikipedia had a bunch of community stuff in the background but it’s cool to see it explicitly given as an important factor behind how it works; that gels much better with my StackExchange experience.
It seemsthat Eliezer had plans to incentivize content production, but that these features never got built. However, I do find it curious that those features were deprioritized enough to be pushed back years into the journey.
I believe I can add something useful to this conversation.
Background: I noticed Wikipedia when it was a relatively new project. I was one of the first registered users of Czech Wikipedia (# 7), one fo the first builders of the Czech community, registered the Czech domain, and gradually worked in different functions suchas an administrator, member of the arbitration committee, checkuser, etc … I was also a founding member of the Czech Wikimedia Chapter.
Since then, I have been following various attempts to compete with Wikipedia (does anyone remember e.g. Google Knol?) And so far in all cases I expected the projects will fail.
Why? Because IMO essential factor behind the success of Wikipedia is the “community design” that is in the background, and which provides incentives to content creators. Common lore it something likeeveryone can edit Wikipedia, and the encyclopedia is written by mostly random crowd of site visitors who click the edit button. That’s complete nonsense. Wikipedia was written mostly by a dedicated community of volunteers with complex internal organization, hierarchies, social rewards, and the possibility of gaining power.
Much of what I did at the begining cz.wiki was translations of various documents about community norms, implementation of different processes, feedbacks, dispute resolution, etc. The community design goals are various, e.g. you want positive feedback loops, you dont want editors to bite each other, you want the community to be meritocratic, and so on. It’s far from obvious how to design such system.
Of course, with most wikipedists, somewhere in the background is an altruistic motivation to help with the aggregation of human knowledge and create something like Encyclopedia Galactica. But on a day-to-day basis, what helps keepeing peeple motivated is working with other dedicated people, receiving feedback, beeing able to see others interacting with your edits and improving further, and even some forms of conflicts . Also valuable editing leads to increasing your weight in the community, you can gain various social goods, responsibility, various functions, and of course power.
Btw the power of senior Wikipedia users is not negligible at all. If we simplify it to counting money, you can imagine what is the value at stake depending on the content of the first page of Google results on many topics, and how much power Google has controlling it. Wikipedia has less influence, but still a lot of influence.
So to summarize, what I see in this portmortem (thanks for wrting it!) from my perspective is almost complete lack of “community design” and thinking about editor motivations. (Community design is different from user aquisiton.)
We did some work on the community design. That’s what Eric Bruylant did part time (slack channel, writing guidelines, etc..). He worked with the Wikipedia community (and other forums) in the past, so he certainly had the right experience. But overall I agree with your sentiment.
Thanks Jan, this was useful. I had a vague sense that Wikipedia had a bunch of community stuff in the background but it’s cool to see it explicitly given as an important factor behind how it works; that gels much better with my StackExchange experience.
It seems that Eliezer had plans to incentivize content production, but that these features never got built. However, I do find it curious that those features were deprioritized enough to be pushed back years into the journey.