Big media, wikis, and lots of wikiwaffle

Steve Outing offers up a very insightful Stop the Presses column, presenting nine New Year’s resolutions for the newspaper industry. But he spoils it by urging us, at number 2, to "dare to wiki". No, no, no, dammit.

"2005 was the year of the wiki; by now, everyone is familiar with Wikipedia,
the open-source encyclopedia that anyone can write for and/or edit. Yet
in the newspaper industry, only a handful of wiki experiments have been
tried. Let’s resolve not to fall further behind Internet culture in
2006, and initiate some significant experiments with wikis."

The industry learned a lot this past year. We now know
that citizen-submitted content to a wiki can be as accurate as
professionally edited content. A study released in December by the
journal Nature discovered that science pages in Wikipedia matched that
of Encyclopedia Britannica in terms of number of significant errors.
And Wikipedia bests Britannica when it comes to its information being
up to date and of much greater breadth."

Outing doesn’t mention the LA Times’ infamous wikitorial experiment. Nor did he mention the less-than-shocking reports that many Wikipedia biographies are written or heavily edited by the subjects themselves, or that some stuff in there is utter, actionable, crap.

The evidence is there to see: Wikis are profoundly unsuited for deployment on big media websites, unless the media owner is prepared to play a very canny game and invest very heavily in moderation. Even then, there’s no guarantee of success.

A cursory look at how Wikis work - socially, not technically - reveals the fatal flaw. In a grassroots venture like Wikipedia, a few committed editors build the wiki and kick things off. Their initial efforts attract a wider group of contributors, who either share or develop strong commitment to the project. Eventually, the effort also attracts a few vandals, but the efforts of the original editors and the new community of contributors neutralises those vandals.

In this process some of the contributors become editors, and the community continues to grow. But because of the growth’s organic nature, the numbers - and commitment - of the editors, contributors and vandals should remain in rough equilibrium.

In a big media Wiki venture, that equilibrium is messed up from day one. A group of professional editors sets the thing up, but the promotional efforts of the exiting big media property means lots and lots of users arrive immediately. A tiny proportion of those users will become contributors, yes, but they are less likely to feel the sense of ownership that turns them into committed editors because this is a commercial effort. They may add stuff, but they’re unlikely to be motivated to do the weeding. That’s left to the pro editors.

But pro editors are few in number, and go home at night. And the same lack of ownership among the user community, and the universal desire among a certain online demographic to stick it to the man, means the vandals will turn up in number, with passion.

Your pages will be in trouble straight away, because the editor/contributor/vandal ratio is wrong right from the start. You could probably express the ratio as a formula, but already it’s a simple equation: bigmedia (wiki+users) = pages filled with goatse.

At Guardian Unlimited, our Been There travel project is wiki-esque, insofar as users create most of the content and can mark things up and down (although you could argue it owes more to blogs than wikis). A series of safeguards, from tight regulation of the kind of content that can be contributed to some skillful editing by dedicated staff, stops it becoming a new Wikitorial. Integrated with the newspaper’s travel section, which uses user contributions every week, it’s been a huge success.

I strongly think this kind of model, rather than the pure wiki model, is the one that’ll work for big media. That’s not, as Steve suggests, being "freaked out by the wiki concept". That’s examining the wiki concept, and seeing it as utterly unfit for the job on a big media site.

COMMENTS / ONE COMMENT

As I mentioned to you and Steve the other day, wikis could be used in an open editing process. If there is a ‘freak out factor’ for newspapers when thinking about open-to-all wikis, how about making the editing process visible but not open? i.e. we readers can look but not touch. As an observer, I think I’d find it fascinating to see an article progress through the editing process on a wiki. Much like, but in a totally different way the editors blog documented the launch of the Berliner Guardian. I guess the question is, what’s in it for the newspaper?