WikiWorld

["Brianna Laugher" <brianna.laugher AT gmail.com>]

Hello wikipeeps,

I was thinking today that it would be rather good if there was a
standard measure for whether a user is part of a wiki community or
not. It is very hard to compare and even talk sensibly about growth
when we don't really know what we should be discussing.

Maybe this would be interesting for people from Wikimedia, AboutUs,
Wikihow, Wikitravel, Wikia, usemod, etc, to get together and figure
out a half-sensible definition.

My thoughts:

* Wiki community = editing community (not including readers)

* May be useful to distinguish between community and active community
(for latter, insert clause 'in last X months') - or maybe active
community is the only meaningful measure...

* Metric: number of edits? Size of edits? (bytes) interaction with
other users? Number of edits seems to be the most useful measure to
me.

* Should the metric be proportional to the size of the wiki? Is that sensible?

*Do differently-focused wikis have massively different editing
patterns anyway? (eg if you are in a books-type project, is the
average edit size much larger than an encyclopedia-style project or
dictionary-style project?)

Perhaps this is a sign of a community member: one who edits a
community discussion page or another user's talk page.Measurable
interaction with another person.

cheers,
Brianna

-- 
They've just been waiting in a mountain for the right moment:
http://modernthings.org/