WikiWorld

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

On 30/09/2007, Angela <beesley AT gmail.com> wrote:
> On 9/29/07, Brianna Laugher <brianna.laugher AT gmail.com> wrote:
> > My thoughts:
> >
> > * Wiki community = editing community (not including readers)
>
> Although the readers aren't part of the community, they're still
> important in many wikis. Although some wikis may be aimed purely at
> the editing community, others are written with the intention of being
> read, so the ratio of readers to editors is interesting in
> highlighting how well the wiki is promoted beyond it's editing group
> and how good it is at drawing in editors from that groups of readers.

Yes. OK, so we have a set of useful metrics, rather than a single 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.
>
> I'd like to add "range of edits". Some wikis have very different
> editing patterns where someone will regularly edit a single page or
> small group of pages but never even look at the rest of the site. I'm
> guessing AboutUs might be one example where many (most?) people keep
> an eye on the page(s) about their own website but aren't part of the
> community and have no involvement in the meta side of the project
> (developing policies, reverting vandalism on pages that aren't
> "theirs", interacting with other users, etc).

Yes, I agree that seems likely. Compare to Wiktionary where I imagine
an editing range is likely to be much more broad.

Sites like Wikipedia are more in the middle, perhaps. Maybe people are
drawn in by one initial topic and discover wikicrack and turn to a
wider range of articles. (I know I have devoted a lot of time to
topics I don't actually care about simply because I was wikiaddicted.)

Another metric: random spread. If one successively hits special:random
a lot, how likely is it similar topics will be stumbled across? (so, a
documentation wiki, installing is not similar to customisation, for
example.) What does the graph of relatedness look like.

Possibly that's not the right question. A 'page' means different
things to different people. Wikibooks and Wikisource have pages as
part of larger works. They are intended to be read in context.
Wiktionary and Wikipedia and AboutUs are "dive in, start anywhere"
style projects.

random musing...

cheers,
Brianna


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