Permaculture Information Web

[Richard Morris <webmaster AT pfaf.org>]

Slashdot had a couple of long articles on wikipedia:
http://features.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/04/18/164213&tid=95
and
http://features.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/04/19/1746205&tid=95&tid=149&tid=9

Good read, particularly interesting to us is an analysis of why 
wikipedia has taken off.

   1. Open content license. We promised contributors that their work 
would always remain free for others to read. This, as is well known, 
motivates people to work for the good of the world--and for the many 
people who would like to teach the whole world, that's a pretty strong 
motivation.
   2. Focus on the encyclopedia. We said that we were creating an 
encyclopedia, not a dictionary, etc., and we encouraged people to stick 
to creating the encyclopedia and not use the project as a debate forum.
   3. Openness. Anyone could contribute. Everyone was specifically made 
to feel welcome. (E.g., we encouraged the habit of writing on new 
contributors' user pages, "Welcome to Wikipedia!" etc.) There was no 
sense that someone would be turned away for not being bright enough, or 
not being a good enough writer, or whatever.
   4. Ease of editing. Wikis are pretty easy for most people to figure 
out. In other collaborative systems (like Nupedia), you have to learn 
all about the system first. Wikipedia had an almost flat learning curve.
   5. Collaborate radically; don't sign articles. Radical 
collaboration, in which (in principle) anyone can edit any part of 
anyone else's work, is one of the great innovations of the open source 
software movement. On Wikipedia, radical collaboration made it possible 
for work to move forward on all fronts at the same time, to avoid the 
big bottleneck that is the individual author, and to burnish articles on 
popular topics to a fine luster.
   6. Offer unedited, unapproved content for further development. This 
is required if one wishes to collaborate radically. We encouraged 
putting up their unfinished drafts--as long as they were at least 
roughly correct--with the idea that they can only improve if there are 
others collaborating. This is a classic principle of open source 
software. It helped get Wikipedia started and helped keep it moving. 
This is why so many original drafts of Wikipedia articles were basically 
garbage (no offense to anyone--some of my own drafts were sometimes 
garbage), and also why it is surprising to the uninitiated that many 
articles have turned out very well indeed.
   7. Neutrality. A firm neutrality policy made it possible for people 
of widely divergent opinions to work together, without constantly 
fighting. It's a way to keep the peace.
   8. Start with a core of good people. I think it was essential that 
we began the project with a core group of intelligent good writers who 
understood what an encyclopedia should look like, and who were basically 
decent human beings.
   9. Enjoy the Google effect. We had little to do with this, but had 
Google not sent us an increasing amount of traffic each time they 
spidered the growing website, we would not have grown nearly as fast as 
we did. (See below.)

We fit with some of these point, 1,2,3,8,9 and hopefully 7,
but not quite 5 or 6.

Enjoy,
        Rich