Wiki, Wiki - Nothing New?
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First off, a wiki not just a new name; it is a whole new paradigm in online publishing. Forums and content management systems have had the same principle of operation, albeit with a closed clique of administrators and editors running the sites. The closest site to a wiki that isn't a wiki is Digg (which is a news aggregator) but a wiki cedes power to the user. While Digg users go around and tag and ping write ups, wiki users create the content, unsupervised and unregulated (to some extent) at the first stages and then other users edit and add to the existing content.
Enough of the detailed preamble, let's look at some assumptions made by wiki sites and why wikis may become the ultimate web publishing tool. After that we will look at various successful models of wiki sites and the tools they use. Finally I will look at the major feature among netizens which will make sure that only the top wiki sites will survive the coming wiki flood.
One Out Of Fifty
Whether put in biological terms and called "Darwinism" or put in economic terms and called "Paretos," the basic fact is a lot of sites (wiki, web 2.0 or whatever) will be part of the churn rate of failed web sites. According to Sitesell only two percent of web sites succeed in generating the necessary traffic that ensures their success; the other 98 percent are "failed" sites. If you want to take a look at my own personal indicator of "churn" rate, check out how many domain names are deleted daily at http://www.deleteddomains.com/.
Even if you jump on the web 2.0 bandwagon via a wiki site, you have to ensure that you understand the technology, and that you make the numbers work for you. As I mentioned previously, the most successful wiki site is wikipedia.org , with over sixteen million pages in English and NO adverts (it is a non profit site run on donations). If Wikipedia started taking adverts they would still be extremely successful but the point is, if the pursuit of money is your primary aim for starting a web site, and you're considering a wiki, then you may have problems along the way.
To be the one out of fifty your web site has to make a difference to the user, but for a wiki site you have to make sure that the numbers work for you. Only a tiny percentage of users of your site will become contributors. For web 2.0 sites, less than one percent (in a lot of cases less than 0.5 percent) of users become contributors. According to Hitwise, only 0.2 percent of Flickr users are contributors while only 0.16 percent of YouTube users are contributors. A notable exception is Wikipedia which has a large four percent of users as "editors" and "contributors."
What the statistics simply means is that you have to assume you will have one contributor for every 200 users on a slow day and one contributor for every 20 users on a good day (note that it is assumed you are running a successful site). If you are stuck with a low traffic wiki site you will probably have to do all the contributing and editing yourself, which more or less defeats the whole purpose of the exercise.
Next: Some More Numbers to Watch >>
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