Sustainability wikis such as Wikia Green or Appropedia have an important role to play, in the gathering of solutions for a sustainable future. The big challenge of course, is how to engage contributors into volunteering free content. As a content creator in the sustainability field, with hundreds of articles to my credit, all on blogs, I yet have to contribute to a collaborative platform. I started sharing some of my reasons in previous posts, here and here. In a nutshell:
- I am comfortable with blogging. It is what I know, and past the initial hurdle of setting up a blog, which by the way is very low, it’s been smooth sailing ever since.
- I like the feeling of being in control, and of having all my stuff in one place.
- When I contribute to other blogs, it is usually a boost for my recognition and helps enlarge my audience.
- Contributing to other blogs is a no brainer; hardly any setup is required, and I usually do a slight rewrite to address issue of duplicate content.
- I love the creative freedom of writing whatever I want whenever I want.
- My blog is also a social place to meet cyberfriends I have made along the way, and who keep coming back for more discussions.
- I get tremendous satisfaction from direct feedback from readers, particularly when something they read on my blog, either from me or other readers, is making an impact on their thinking or behaviors.
- There is lots of reciprocity going on amongst bloggers, thanks to linking, trackbacks, and pingbacks. As a result, the give and take feels very fair.
- Although I am very familiar with wikis, have consulted for wiki startups, and have started several private wikis of my own, I find making the move from blogging to contributing to public wiki platforms a huge step.
- First, there is the issue of time. If I could somehow export content that’s already on my blog, automatically, I would consider it.
- Second, is the problem of attribution, and ownership of content. Although, I am not one to hang on to my creative product with steel claws, it is very important to me that I be given credit for it.
- Third, is the issue of duplicate content, and how that might affect ranking of original content with search engines. If content is going to be exported automatically, and frequently, I would not have the time to do rewrites to avoid duplicate content problem.
- My blog is not my only source of content either. There are quite a few projects I have been working on, that are sitting either in some files on my desktop, or in Google groups discussions, and that I wouldn’t mind sharing, if I could just turn those over with one click.
The bottom line is, if you want my content, make it super easy for me, and make sure I get credit for it.
There is a huge pool of potential content providers like myself, scattered all over the Internet, and elsewhere, who could share their knowledge, under the right conditions:
I will end by sharing my dream of the perfect sustainability wiki. Imagine a place where you can find nearly all that has been published about sustainable solutions all over the world. Imagine that contributors would not have to worry about adapting their content to the specific wiki requirements. Wiki editors could take care of that chore. Imagine that contributors could get credited each time, with ample linkage back to their original websites. Imagine a widget that would allow contributors to send their content automatically to the wiki in one click. Imagine that getting my content on the wiki would be all benefit for me, in addition to the reward from helping the greater community. Imagine . . .
Maybe this discussion can be continued at the upcoming Open Sustainability Network Camp that will take place in October, in San Francisco?
My Dear Ms. Marguerite,
Well, you’ve done it again! You’ve clearly articulated genuine concerns that I’ve felt and yet barely had the time/energy to think-through for myself much less voice to anyone else.
As is often the case, you seem to be a few steps ahead of me in tapping into our noosphere with respect to such questions as “Now what are we going to do?” and “How can we get there from here?” Thanks for your trailblazing efforts and insights!
As I checked out the OSN Camp link, I ran across Sergio Lub’s name. I just sent him a message to reconnect after about 20 years of no contact (so, you’ve helped do that again, too!). Sergio’s bold work enabling the power of human trust to have a greater influence in our species’ commercial activity systems still inspires me to this day.
Perhaps if I can manage to free myself up and attend the OSN Camp, I’ll get the chance to proudly shake your hand, look you in the eyes and thank you in person. That’d be cool.
Ciao for now,
paul
I don’t contribute to wikis about green stuff because I don’t see the point. Lack of information isn’t the problem, it’s lack of motivation. Just as we have more information on food packets and yet rising obesity, so too could we have more environmental information around and yet rising emissions and general impact.
Blogs are better for motivating people. We can spread radical ideas and make them seem mundane and obvious, we can try many different tones – friendly, inclusive, discursive, hectoring, whatever – to bring different people on board, and so on. You can’t do that with a wiki, it has to be impartial and non-motivating in tone.
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No matter how you position it, challenging people to think differently about the way they consume requires engagement and conversation. While we all gain from reading each others thoughts and ideas, we are essentially preaching to the converted. It is the same with green wiki’s. They are great and they do ensure collaboration but this needs to extend beyond the group of green minded people/contributors. Otherwise it runs the risk of being inward facing.
Social media is about getting yourself heard. It is about the dissemination of information. It is about participation and conversations. How do we engage people who we need to hear the message? How can we actively change behaviour? What can we do to challenge peoples frame of reference so they are open to and understand our message? The more we use the language of the converted, the less we are understood by the unconverted.
“While we all gain from reading each others thoughts and ideas, we are essentially preaching to the converted.”
Not always. You should see the comments I reject from my blog. At least half are anonymous people expressing passionate, though not eloquent, disagreement.
Nonetheless, as I’ve said before, we don’t need a majority of people to change to effect widespread social change. A majority of blacks did not march with MLK, still less did a majority of whites. A majority of women did not join the Suffragettes. A majority of Germans did not support the Nazi Party when it first came to office (though they certainly supported it later on). A majority of Russians did not support the Bolsheviks. A majority of people in every republic given the choice voted in 1991 to keep the Soviet Union. A majority of people do not commit violent crimes, and a majority of people do not give any substantial amount of their income to charity.
Social change, good or bad, comes not from the majority but a loud and annoying minority. Small groups of angry people change society.
Reading your post, I realized that the success of Wikipedia is actually a peculiar thing. Compared to blogging, contributing to Wikipedia is quite hard. Or at least there’s a big initial hurdle to overcome.
Yet, while it may not be the most convenient activity, or the best form of self-expression, there are people working on Wikipedia all day. Why? Well I think it’s because all those contributors are convinced they’re doing an important job (I’m convinced of that too), and they get tremendous satisfaction out of that.
To put it bluntly: Wikis are a pain. But people are willing to put up with that pain if the end result is valuable enough.
And that, the value of the end result, is what projects like Wikia Green and Appropedia have to convey, and also make plausible. They are at a disadvantage to Wikipedia (in its early days) in this, because Wikipedia always had a clear reference point: an encyclopedia. Encyclopedias had proven their value long before Wikipedia. We’ve never seen a sustainability encyclopedia before. People only know of blogs, newspaper articles, reports, and some information retrieval systems.
Without such a reference point, a project leader faces the task of explaining what it is that all the hard work will result in, and make it plausible that other people will like that result. E.g. like it better for some tasks than what already out there. Actually, if using such a centralized source would only seem better than other sources in edge cases, then people might not find the effort worthwhile at all. So there’s some huge selling to do. Selling something that is not there.
Now I can’t believe that the personality traits of Wikipedia editors can’t be found in the green community. Quite likely, some of the Wikipedia editors are greens. So I think such a sustainability wiki (with authority comparable to Wikipedia) could happen, yet it’s very hard to get of the ground.
I think that in the end, this comes down to a matter of leadership. Someone, preferably with existing authority and great communication skills should tirelessly explain the value of this concept to others. Having the blessing of someone like Gore or Mckibben would help. People want to feel sure they’re working on the next big thing, and not on the latest fad. Only that way up to the pain of editing wiki pages (compared to just writing what’s on your mind in free form).
The importance of a reference point can also be seen in open source projects. High-profile projects like Linux, Firefox and OpenOffice have all been started at a time when competing software already existed. You could say that people knew what they were building beforehand.
Many years ago, I’ve been active contributor to the Open Directory Project ( http://dmoz.org/ ) . Their reference point clearly was the Yahoo directory. The Yahoo directory was really important back then, and thus editors knew their contribution to an “open source” Yahoo would be highly valued, eventually. And indeed, their freely available XML data eventually got integrated into the mainstream search engines, including Google (even as of today I think).
Now I’ve said my thing about the psychology of “work”, let’s move on to the psychology of “play”. That one is quite simple: People like to play. The trick is to let them play in such a way that they don’t hurt each other, preferably help each other along, and the holy grail obviously is to capture the spillover.
Currently, there is lots of ineffective (competitive) play going around (stock markets for example). It would be better if it would all be cooperative play (as how most conversations could be characterized). Recording conversations as audio or video is a sure bet, but having the conversation as text is even better. That’s why I think one of the most important things to achieve is to get more conversations happening on the web instead of face-to-face, by email or by phone. It will also make it easier for “strangers” to walk in to a conversation, quite possibly with very valuable insights.
Capturing all value hidden in conversations is still a long way off I think. To me, that’s the holy grail of automated collective intelligence (instead of the handwork seen in Wikipedia).
In the end, it’s all about capturing the semantics of gestures : its meaning. (I use the word gestures to include all “expressions) of person, verbal and nonverbal) One proven way to capture semantics is to severely limit the available gestures. You see this with things like voting, tagging and ratings. In fact all forms which ask you for one fact per fieldEven threaded discussions (where one reply is explicitly linked to a previous one) is an instance of that. This is about where we are now, in terms of mainstream technology.
I do think it’s possible to do more with non-semantic data. There are lots of “vertical” search engines out there which capture specific semantics from pages, product (and price) information being the most prevalent example. If 100% accuracy is not a concern, you can do lots with simple text processing. There are also open source NLP (natural language processing) engines. One of the hardest things in fact might be to capture the semantics of page layout: e.g. the question “To which part of the page applies this header, only the table below, or also all text below it?” but it gets even harder with randomly inserted elements.
I think in the near future, hybrid forms between automation and handwork will be prevalent. It might be that there will come tools available that allow you to push free-form text into a central database, after which the tool ask you questions on parts of the semantics that are ambiguous.
One thing is clear: if we’d have perfect semantic interpretation of natural languages, we’d have perfect machine translation. You only have to look at the current state of machine translation to see how far off we are on that.
I’m assuming that all required data will in fact be produced effortlessly in conversations. For this to happen, the medium must support the same social possibilities as the real world. Things like networking, recognition, status, reciprocity, etc come to mind. Luckily, tools like blogs and twitter work very well in this regard. The key is to let more conversation happen there instead of true other media (including plain old air), and subsequently try to extra more value from these conversations.
In response to other commenters: Knowledge is indeed not particularly useful to people who don’t want to learn. But this applies the same to Wikipedia. It just might be that currently some encyclopedic knowledge is considered more interesting (in terms of popularity) than more practical information. Nevertheless, the potential number of beneficiaries for this type of knowledge is huge.
Getting people interested in green living and sustainability issues can fairly safe be approached as a separate issue.
I agree a 100 percent with Kyle. great thoughts ! many thanks for the enlightening thoughts
One thing that I -we- did not address in this thread, deals with positioning.
Appropedia for instance is focused more on hard core sustainability solutions with a slant towards science, technology, and business. The term sustainability itself implies a crowd of converted, people looking for a toolbox with all the tools they could possibly want to accomplish their sustainability mission. Engagement for these users is more in terms of usability, and ability to quickly find available solutions for particular problem they are trying to solve. Users of such a wiki are more likely to be contributors as well. I see quite a lot of bartering of solutions taking place there.
Green Wikia aims for more of a consumer base, and is probably facing a higher threshold of engagement.
Kyle, I believe there is room for both wikis, and blogs. I certainly would love to use a sustainability wiki. My problem is as a contributor, and not being willing to put up with current hurdles.
Meryn, I am totally with you, in term of the need for better mining technology to extract and aggregate relevant information from existing conversations, and putting it in one central place, where it remains alive. Meanwhile, I think it is possible to do some of that job manually. This is why I advocate for the separation of tasks between content creators and content curators. Those require two separate sets of skills and there is no point in trying to merge the two.
“, I think it is possible to do some of that job manually. ”
That’s what Wikipedia editors do in fact. There’s no original knowledge there. It’s forbidden!
“separation of tasks between content creators and content curators”
I agree with that. But the role of “curator” remains a pain, which would require a very strong sense of purpose to overcome. More than what fuels most blogging, I think.
In general, having more people tagging content on delicious would help. No one should use private bookmarks anymore, except for truly private affairs. I’ve already profited in the past from all the environmentalists on Delicious, but the more there are, the better. It will give very powerful content retrieval.
A few reactions to this:
– How do you propose that such a wiki would actually work? Say for example you penned an article on biofuels, and were credited for your work and rewarded with a link. Subsequently, if another writer came by and radically modified your article, would you still receive a link and credit? It seems to me that the core strength of wikipedia, the collaborative effort of the group, is fundamentally at odds with crediting individual authors.
– I am skeptical that there are very many who would provide wiki content if only wiki would in turn promote their website/business. So I don’t think it would present a big value-add in terms of increased content either.
– It also strikes me that discarding the mandate of a wiki (free information, contributed freely) by commercializing the content would introduce a new conflict of interest. You say: “Contributing to other blogs is a no brainer; hardly any setup is required, and I usually do a slight rewrite to address issue of duplicate content.” This is an admittance of self-plagiarism, which is frowned upon in both the journalistic and academic communities for obvious reasons. Please dont take this the wrong way. You are a consultant writing a blog, which is of course a very different scenario than the news or an academia. It does display, however, that an author submitting for the purpose of getting their name out there is more concerned with quantity and placement, which is not necessarily a trait valuable for the reader of an encyclopedia.
– I would think that with a subject with as many impassioned supporters as there are for clean tech/csr/environmental advocacy that there would be a sufficient desire for this sort of participation without altering the fundamental nature of the wiki. The reason that a green wiki may not be doing super well may be that it is in direct competition with normal wikipedia. Why go read or contribute to the biofuels entry on the green wiki when a google search for biofuels pings back normal wiki at the #1 spot? Maybe the niche market for specialized wikis just isnt there for a subject as broad as being green.
cheers,
Taylor
La Marguerite, thanks for kicking off such a a lively discussion about the ways people can come together to share their knowledge, views, and personal stories in the environmental space. I work on product and content development for Wikia, and I’ve been working with Jimmy to help get Green Wikia off the ground. I have a couple thoughts to offer up to the conversation:
Wikis are an open collaboration platform that is focused on the content, and not the contributor. Blogs are different — they’re focused on one voice. Lots of people can comment, but those comments are usually in direct response to a topic the blogger chose to cover (not to mention they can be approved or rejected by the author). The blog model is more like broadcasting to an audience, even if the audience tends to talk back.
Wikis support a fundamental belief that a work of knowledge will be fuller and of higher quality if people can collaborate together openly, without an arbiter. There are a few benefits to this model, I think. Blogs can be lonely, if you’re not a good self-promoter or you get writer’s block. Many wiki editors find it more fun and rewarding to write when others are there helping them and doing it alongside them. On a blog, if the author gets tired or takes a break for a few months, the content is at a standstill. On a wiki, there are always people ready and willing to pick up the slack and step up. This immortalizing of one’s contributions is very motivating.
Then there’s the issue of readership. Some bloggers are very good at promoting their content and getting lots of readers. Some people have great content to share, but simply don’t have the time or the network. When you group these types of people together, it creates a positive network effect.
All that said, wikis have higher start-up costs. It can take weeks or months before a crowd shows up to jump in and start writing. This is why it’s important to spend some time on the front-end setting up for the party, and creating an inviting environment. We spent the last four months doing this for Wikia Green, so that when we announced it people wouldn’t be scared off by a blank page. That said, it’s still far from being a useful consumer resource. But that’s how wikis work — they come together piece by piece, as people contribute what they know.
If anyone remembers what Wikipedia looked like in 2001 or 2002, you would have had a similar take… what’s the motivation? Where are the contributors? This will never work! Many wikis don’t work because the content is not motivating or the founders can’t get the word out. Wikia Green is facing the same challenges, but I’m confident that many people (like the ones commenting and reading this post) will find the topic engaging enough and the environment fun and welcoming enough to join in!
Angies
You have enumerated a great many reasons on why people prefer to blog. Most of them resonate with me, though I do not have many readers and hardly any comments/feedback. I do it because I like to. It started as a nice central place for me to collect various things on subjects I was interested in… but in order to make it of some interest, I have tried over the last year or so to bring some focus to it by honing in on a few topics only; environment & energy issues being one of them.
Anyways, there are literally hundreds of sites (so much so that let alone bookmarks, even Feed readers are not adequate to keep track of them) that blog about green issues today. And yet, I didn’t even know about the two wikis you mention here!! I, who admittedly spend way too much time online.
So, what we need is not more blogs and more wikis (though I am not saying people should stop with those… more of them, not less is the answer) but 1-2 blogs which capture the people’s imagination on the subject and which everyone comes to read daily. Like what Arrianna Huffington or Markos (of Dailykos) have achieved in their spheres of interest. The green movement does not have such a visible and across-the-board influencer. Not to offend but as great as this blog is, it is still a small segment of life-minded people reading about issues that they are more or less already convinced about. We all preach to the choir..or so it feels sometimes.
[Related: Dot Earth on NYT is a great blog. NYT, though not read as extensively in the red states probably, has some influence. Just read there that they are starting yet another Green Blog. “Green Inc., that they describe as a “daily churn” exploring the intersection of energy, the environment and business.” So, obviously there is some effort being put into this even by MSM.]
But you need people to be passionate and interested in green issues before you can have a famous blogger on green issues …so, I maybe agree with what Kiashu says: “Lack of information isn’t the problem, it’s lack of motivation.”
It’s easy to be reckless, lazy, and not care. It takes effort to care and make a difference. People are not motivated to spend a little more because of concern for climate change, no matter how many times Al Gore (and others) talk about it. They’ll readily go buy $50,000 Hummers and electricity soaking $4-5K monster TVs though! (The norm of $200-400 TVs became 10x that and no one blinked an eyelid! Yes…its superior technology but it rankles me when people talk about how expensive it is to be ‘green’. Yes…it sometimes is, though it does not have to be. And if you care for future generations and what toll human kind is taking on earth (in just 2-3 centuries), you would just be motivated enough to take a few extra steps to not cause as much damage.
Case in point: Simple issues of efficiency and conservation* hardly need expensive solutions and yet very few adopt them.
Even with the green movement taking on some urgency and getting mileage in news media due to the rising energy costs, the needle has only moved infinitesimally in the last few years.
So, what will get Americans (I live in the US and so write about it. Not blaming them alone, by any means, for climate change…though they are amongst the highest contributors on a per capita basis to CO2 in the atmosphere) to change their lifestyles… not just us “elitists” on the coasts but all $300M+ of us?
—
* I do not recall how I found this blog but one of the things that immediately caught my attention and made me an instant-fan was that you (lamarguerite) talk about these issues.
wooohoo…
Senate Voting on Renewable Energy Tax Credits
UPDATE, 6:30 PM: The Senate has overwhelmingly passed the bill 93-2.
from the aforementioned Green Inc. site
http://greeninc.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/09/23/senate-voting-on-renewable-energy-tax-credits/
I have to go eat dinner but I’ll come back and read the details…
We’re working on ways to move Appropedia to the right side of the graph. MediaWiki is great, but having easier ways to participate is key. Technical improvements to make it easier to edit is an important step – we have something lined up, but are trying to get some technical help.
Another very important thing is to create more links between blogs, wikis and any other sites. Bloggers being aware of the wikisphere is one thing.
To really see your work be used though, use an open license, that’s compatible with the wikis you want to work with. That’s why I’m working today on display the license notice on our new blog at – http://blogs.appropedia.org/ and why I suggested it to La Marguerite. Note that there’s different licenses out there, so I’d recommend at least a dual license of CC-BY-SA and GFDL, so it really can be freely used.
This does take some openness of spirit, in allowing people to reuse the content, as part of pages that may not be exactly in line with your own ideas. But if your happy with a note at the bottom of the page saying something like “this page uses content from…” then you may see your work being used in more powerful ways than sitting in a blog archive.
I’m making a few notes at http://www.appropedia.org/Open_licenses – with links to other articles, such as this one explaining why it matters: http://www.appropedia.org/Appropedia:Make_your_content_free – thoughts and edits welcome!
More later…
Blogs are better for motivating people – this is probably true. And they are more conversational. I find reading and writing blogs useful and enjoyable.
But wikis are better for informing, especially as they grow large with an active community.
Wikis are better at retaining information. Organizations and people doing great work for development and sustainability too often haven’t had a way to share that information, so it has effectively sunk without a trace, and the next person has to learn the hard way. Wikis are a collective memory and a flexible space for learning and sorting the different ways of solving a problem.
Lamarguerite: re the difference between Appropedia (focused more on hard core sustainability solutions with a slant towards science, technology, and business) and Green Wikia (more of a consumer base) – perhaps it is true that there is a higher threshold of engagement for Green Wikia, but there is also a larger base. With more of a consumer orientation, hopefully it will reach a wide audience and introduce them to the idea that a wiki is a great place to find solutions, and also to *share* them.
I agree with the sentiment that there are places for many different approaches … as well as online and in person.
My own style is blogging, writing papers (not that much different than blogging I guess), working on a book, lectures (this is where I have had the most impact – mostly in changing operations in companies and perhaps inspiring a few people), and working on projects where I am physically with people.
I find the online work to be useful, but not personally as satisfying as working with others face to face. Everyone is different – this is what works for me.
I find wikis ok, but they don’t do anything for me. There is a huge amount of information out there and very little real inspiration.
There is another area where online intersects with real world projects – namely fund raising. I’m involved in a few projects where funding is very important.
It is probably wrong for me to appeal here, but my friend Colleen has a project that is trying to get kids more active and prepare them for thinking about riding bikes, gardening and other activities as normal and even fun. The goal is to get young people doing green things without thinking about them being green – the right thing is what should come naturally. This is a very different approach than trying to make people change their lives out of guilt or purse … many approaches are needed, but she is working (with help from my own microfoundation and a few others) on coming at it from the joy angle.
If you have a few bucks laying around, this is a good investment in the future I think. $20 is extremely helpful, $100 would be a godsend at this point.
http://www.6footsix.com/my_weblog/2008/06/the-green-team.html
(she is using the fact that she is an athlete to get the kid’s attention in the first place – then the conversation can begin)
thanks! and I understand if this shouldn’t be here Marguerite…
Hmm – I actually made three comments here, and the first one hasn’t appeared. I assumed it was because it had links (incl a link to the Appropedia page on open licenses) and needed approval. But maybe it’s just lost?
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Very intereesting topic and one I have pondering at length. Blogs are great for getting a dialogue going and people engaged – much better than wikis as the usage is easier – no tricky wiki markup, easy image upload, one click create, and drag and drop configuration (in many cases).
Postings can be found using seach engines too.
However the content in blog postings does tend to be ephemeral; I lose track of what I put on my own blog, let alone the dozens of others I frequent.
This where wikis can be valuable.
We stated Greenlivingpedia in 2007. We felt that many green directories and information sources are commercial, filtered or corporate, and there was a need for an open wiki that everyone could add content and collaborate on solutions and practices for a sustainable future. We also work with and complement other wikis such Appropedia and Envirowiki.
We also felt that some Wikipedia policies constrain people for getting content up on green living topics.
Building community and getting contributors is not an easy task though.
Our initial focus was to provide an information resource focusing on sustainable housing and building, but contributions have spread to other topics such as community action, energy efficiency, climate change, green computing and green carbon more recently too.
The arrival of Wikia Green in the same space with a lot of profile generated by Jimmy Wales is interesting to watch.
The more collaboration on green matters the better off we all are, but distributed information sources will be a challenge for all of us going forward.
Peter, thanks for joining in. I did not know about Greenlivingpedia. Will check it out. Will you be at the Open Sustainability Network Camp? I know Appropedia, and Wikia Green will be there. It would be great to have everyone meeting in the same room.
Lamarguerite, I have worked quite closely with Appropedia on wiki matters over the last two years.
I am not planning on joining the sustainability network camp due to current work commitments and a recent aversion to flying (to keep my carbon footprint down!), but I would like to be there . . .
I am sure the Appropedia folk will represent me in spirit at the camp, and will read all the outputs with interest. Have a good time there.
I’m hoping we can get the online conference working well – working in it at http://www.appropedia.org/OSNCamp_2008/OSNCamp_Online – so we can allow the possibility for those from other parts of the world to join some of the conversations. Definitely want Peter to be a part of that – and I’ve also met Peter a couple of times (he’s from Melbourne, I’m from Sydney) and often emailed etc, so I can have a go at representing him.
Thanks Chris. Love the idea of having everybody in same ‘room’.
I’m joining rather late, but nevertheless having some thoughts on this excellent conversation.
First, yes, of course, blogs and wikis (and forums) offer different benefits. As a consumer, I go to blogs for different reasons than I go to wikis. I like a particular person’s insight and perspective, so I subscribe to their blog feed. When I want a centralized and comprehensive site of a particular kind of content, I go to a wiki.
This post and thread have done a great job of highlighting the issue of attribution. Although wikis have the technology to support attribution, it’s semi-meaningless. At Wikipedia, it’s meaningless because the content is not supposed to be original. In addition, it’s actually pretty tricky to extract authorship of any particular segment of an article. So, why the fuss? My sense is that “who contributed what” matters to the contributors for sorting out small edit wars. But also, I think the notion of maintaining authorship attribution is philosophically important, and worth promoting.
But overall, I agree that folks who care that their contributions are usefully attributed are going to enjoy blogging more than wiki contributions. To contribute much to a wiki, you’ve got to have some passion for the mission: usually a centralized, consolidated, self-correcting repository of information. If that mission doesn’t motivate you, then you’re not going to contribute.
As I write this, it occurs to me that there’s another small advantage of a wiki from a contributor’s perspective: if you feel you have a particular skill, that might work better at a wiki than in a blog. A blog author handles all the work: content, grammar, linking, formatting, inserting images, tagging, etc. That can be distributed to multiple people with different skill sets on a wiki. Depending on who you are, that is either a good or bad thing!
All this reminds me of a study of online communities that my wife’s firm did. Search for this at Rubicon Consulting: online-communities-and-their-i.html. It’s business-oriented, but useful for folks trying to build a community. Enjoy.
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