WikiWorld

["Ben Yates" <ben.louis.yates AT gmail.com>]

A significant fraction of wikipedia's content was added "drive-by" --
by users who didn't register or come back to edit again.

On 10/3/07, Nick Jenkins <nickpj AT gmail.com> wrote:
> > OK, so another interesting thing is: how many *active community
> > members* are needed for an *active community*?
>
> Perhaps:
> One active member = a soliloquy
> Two active members = a conversation
> >= Three active members = a community
>
> (i.e. maybe an early sign of a community is that someone says something, 
> then
> someone corrects them, and then someone else tells them that they're both 
> wrong!)
>
> When a community goes from being a community to an *active* community is
> pretty subjective. Maybe it's when sub-communities start to appear? I.e. 
> when
> the original single community is sufficiently broad and noisy that people 
> feel the
> desire to break it out into different parts / interests.
>
> > Is there more to an active community than a collection of active
> > community members?
>
> Yes - interaction between the members. A site with people working off on 
> separate
> areas and never interacting is not an active community. It's just a group 
> of people
> who happen to share a wiki.
>
> > > > * Should the metric be proportional to the size of the wiki? Is that 
> > > > sensible?
> > >
> > > I don't think that it is relevant. If English Wikipedia has 2M
> > > articles and 100 edits per minute, it doesn't makes it equal with some
> > > other project which has 20K of articles and 1 edit per minute.
> >
> > That's not what I meant. What I meant was maybe on a tiny wiki, 5
> > edits makes you an active community member. On English Wikipedia,
> > maybe it is 100? Or is it still the same 5?
>
> Isn't that partially also a metric for how "sticky", and how much 
> interesting content,
> and how old the site is? Also maybe people see themselves relative to other 
> people
> in terms of determining whether they're an active community member or not - 
> so
> 5 edits on a very small wiki probably does make you an active member, and 
> on EN
> Wikipedia it probably is 100 edits - because "active" can be a relative 
> measure -
> i.e. active compared to whom - and I think the normal answer is "compared 
> to most
> other people using the wiki".
>
> -- All the best,
> Nick.
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-- 
Ben Yates
Wikipedia blog - http://wikip.blogspot.com