< Wikimania.org

Enhancing Wiki's with Social Networking Tools edit

• by Evan Prodromou / Wikitravel, Vinisimo, Keiki guy

• Weird cultist turned Internet Entrepreneur

• What makes wiki great?
  • cumulative effect, drop dead easy, adapts to community changes, keeps getting better, consensus to something like "objective"

• Can wiki's do anything? yes, but not always the best tool for the job

• Evan tries to demo WikiClock

• what wiki doesn't do well
  • automated jobs
  • personal opinion
  • protected content
  • structured documents
  • emotion, opinion, owenership, identity

• Communities
  • communities of practice (wikipedia - making an encyclopedia)
  • communities of interest (may not be working on something as concrete, but want to hang out together)
  • both kinds of communities work together

• The whole point is to get people to do work together

• some #s
  • 65% engage for one day or less
  • 95% less than one month
  • <70% of edits

• The upshot
  • retaining users will result in lots more free content

• features that work well with wiki
  • social networking
  • blogs
  • photo sharing
  • forums
  • social bookmarking
  • pretty much the web 2.0 recipe book

• other
  • keep users who feel "finished"
  • encourage community
  • build reputation
  • easy personal entry point for the less bold

• organizing it all
  • tagging
  • controlled vocabulary
  • faceted tagging ("machine tagging")

• wiki page -> tag(s) -> blog posts, photos, forum posts, bookmarks
  • to associate wiki content with non-wiki content

• DRY
  • Don't Repeat Yourself
  • all this stuff is already done on other sites
  • aggregation pulls together user's work from other places
  • tagging for filters
  • last resort versions for peopel who don't have it already
  • RSS, FOAF , Web APIs

• How to do it?
  • DIY
  • open source (Drupal, etc.)

• Challenges
  • Impedance mismatches
  • Shared login

• Case study - Wikitravel Extra
  • Travel - extremely personal
  • opinion of locals and experienced travellers
  • reviews
  • photo's that don't work for a travel guide
  • integrating communities

• Technology
  • Drupal
  • Shared login: OpenID
  • Jillions of plugins
  • some custom software, lots of glue code

• vocabularies
  • geography
  • languages
  • licensing
  • free tags

• Wikitravel Extra Demo

• Results
  • hundreds of users
  • thousands of posts
  • hundreds of links to wiki
  • new users on extra who've never been on wikitravel
  • old users re-activating

• Future enhancements
  • travel logs
  • ...

• Second case study: Kei.ki
  • personal: travel to parenting
  • free content parenting guide
  • parents talk even more than travellers
  • we use photosharing and blogging tools
  • privacy concerns
  • local information

• challenges
  • no existing wiki community
  • keep focus on content production
  • existing non-free parenting web sites