LIS 9763

(As a librarian, puns aren't a hobby.  They're a responsibility.)
 

 
By the way, if anyone know how to force the preview to stop at a certain point, I'd love to know.
 
Reading about wikis has been interesting (especially vis-a-vis the conversation about GCPedia and the problems of getting things moving in government).  It was also nice to see my rough recollection of the ratio of uber-active wiki-ites to regulars to viewers was pretty close, which leads into...
 
**ARTICLES!**
Know it all - Stacy Schiff [New Yorker]
This is where I found out I was pretty close, numbers-wise.  I was even planning to crunch some stats and find actual percentages, but Wikipedia's English-user stats seem to be frozen in time right around the time this article was posted.  So, 2% of wikipedians were doing most of the work, and I'd guessed 1%, referring to biker gangs.

Based on the assumption that they are indeed getting ~75,000,000 unique visitors a month, then it really is 1% of the people using wikipedia who contribute content.  So you get the 1% of the 1% who carry the load.

This is, of course, a issue that's bigger that wikipedia (I do have a point).  This means that you need to have a steady audience of 100 before 1 person starts adding stuff, and 100 of those before you get a cornerstone.  That's 10,000 people.

My home city, Regina, has a population of 194,971 (or is it 179,246, Wikipedia?  Make up your mind, or I'll put you on notice)^1.  Best case, scenario, you'd have 1,950 contributors, and 19.5 anchors (the 0.5 is using his mom's account).

Of course, "only" 94,136 of Regina's 187,000 bodies have registered as clients.  So now we're at 940 & 9.  So how many would actually be interested in a wiki in the first place?
 
Well, according to this random site which must be authorative because it came up on the first page of my google search, wikipedia gets 7.5% of the 1 Billion internet users a month.  You see where I'm going with this.

But I'm not saying this to be a downer.

The big lesson to take away from the census soup I'm stirring around is to manage expectations, and that applies to all user-participation technology.  In the spirit of the season: commitment is hard to get, and most of the people who dabble will walk away.  And that's totally ok.

Hmmm, I wanted to say more, but I've babbled a bunch already.  So, lets be brief...
 
So you want to build a wiki? - Meredith Farkas

• And this strikes me as part of the key in resolving the participation issue.  Stay focused.
• Isn't it odd how so much of the Web2.0 best practice stuff overlaps?  The same rules I'm ignoring in this blog post apply to wikis.
• Let me add to Farkas what we talked about in the chat: plan (& work) ahead of time.  I'm having the same experience working on subject guides in delicious.  Sitting down once I had some content and doing some serious thinking about what I thought was important enough to force some bibliographic control on, and what I should just relax on made my life so much easier.

 
Luis Suarez - When Wikis Won't Work: 10 Questions to Ask Before Full Adoption

• I feel so negative in this post.  I'm not trying to be.  Suarez kind of embodies the gospel I've been reading from, and it's not negative.  It's thinking ahead and asking:

 "WHY ARE YOU DOING THIS?"
 
Literally.  Sit down and write it out.  Call it a mission statement, if you like.  But you really need one.  Because "VVHY?" is something you need to come back to repeatedly so you don't go too far out of scope. 
 
CASE STUDY (just 1)
 
Which brings us to Bull Run.  I mentioned Bull Run in the chat--actually, I made fun of Bull Run in the chat.  I was mean, and when I finally got to boiling all this down to WHY, I had to ask that about this wiki.  So I did some poking around to try and figure it out.

• The Bull Run Regional Library is in Manassas, Virginia, which is a town of 36'000. 
• Their hours of operation tell me they've got some staff, but I imagine time is as tight there as it is for any other library. 
• When you look at the Calendar on the wiki--they are busy.  That's where all the people-hours have gone.

I imagine the wiki's just easier to update and maintain.  Which is a good enough reason for me--they've got a defined scope, they're sticking to it, and it works well for them.  And I'm sorry I was such a jerl about it.
 
 
(^1) This totally falls flat without an embedded image.  And I'd be mean if I didn't let you put things on notice too.