For those who couldn’t attend Wikimania, the annual international Wikimedia conference, this panel of top contributors to the wiki community reviews some of the latest developments, lessons learned, and what to expect from Wikimedia in the future. Adina Levin of SocialText leads a panel that includes Wikimedia executives and other noted wiki experts as they share highlights from Wikimania 2009. The panelists discuss a project that would allow Wikimedia to be more usable for contributers, opportunities to help Wikimedia move forward, and the latest wiki trends. Yahoo!'s Micah Alpern describes the culture of Wikimania. Sue Gardner, Wikimedia's executive director, covers the foundations priorities and projects. Ed Chi of PARC summarizes his much-discussed research on the slowing growth of Wikipedia, with data, models, and possible explanations. Naoko Komura shows off the achievements of Wikimedia's Usability Project and describes its future plans. Jack Herrick of wikiHow describes his company's efforts to increase contributions to wikis. The broad wiki community is strong, productive, and inventive, and our panelists are a few of the people who help make it a success. Whether you use wikis for reference, contribute to wikis at work, use other kinds of user-contributed media, or participate in open-source communities, you'll learn a lot from these experts.

1. BayCHI 10.13.09 Redux
Micah Alpern - Overview of Wikimania
Sue Gardner & Erik Möller- Wikimedia Foundation
Ed Chi - Slowing growth of Wikipedia
Naoko Komura - Wikipedia Usability
Jack Herick - Lessons from WikiHow

2. Flavor of the conference
Big trends:
Confronting slowing growth
Maintain Quality
How/why (demographic shifts)
What to do about it Usability, Policy, Engagement
Taken by Beatrice Murch (blmurch)

5. Erik Zachte, Wikipedia's stats guru/czar/master.

6. Maintain Quality Confront Slowing
Growth

7. Maintain Quality Confront Slowing
Growth
Data, models, &
Flagged Revisions
explanation
WikiTrust Usability Initiative
Answers Community Moderations Strategic Planning

13. Photo of Richard Stallman Wikimedia keynote by mat-

15. # of active contributors plateauing
Photo of Jimmy Wales by blmurch

20. http://usability.wikimedia.org

24. Jennifer Riggs presenting on volunteer lifecycle at the Red Cross

25. Flagged Revisions
articles at high risk of
vandalism
eg. biographies of living
people

28. Traditional Moderation
Failed
As Answers grew traditional
moderation methods failed to
scale with the community.
Manual customer care systems:
Had slow response times
Treated all abuse reports the same
Had high false positive and false negative rates
Were high cost and scaled up with traffic

29. Answers Community
Moderation
To address these challenges:
challenges:
Deployed a new
Community Moderation
system
Empowered trusted Answers users to help moderate
content by allowing their report abuse actions to
automatically delete content.
content.
Illustration by Bryce Glass
System didn’t reveal reputation scores to users,
didn’ users,
Encouraged them to report accurately so they could gain
more community influence.
influence.

30. WikiTrust
Luca de Alfaro, Ian Pye, and Bo Adler from UC Santa Cruz

31. Panel of current and former Arbicon committee

32. Simultaneous Spanish/English
Spanish/
Translation

37. Strategic planning
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Strategic_planning_2009
photo of Eugene Kim from blmurch

38. Agenda for the evening
Intro
Micah Alpern - Overview of Wikimania
Sue Gardner & Erik Möller- Wikimedia Foundation
Ed Chi - Slowing growth of Wikipedia
Naoko Komura - Wikipedia Usability
Jack Herick - Lessons from WikiHow

39. Wikimedia Foundation
Speakers
Sue Gardner -Executive Director
Erik Möller - Deputy Director

40. Wikimania Redux
Sue Gardner and Erik Möller
Wikimedia Foundation
http://strategy.wikimedia.org/

41. Slowing Growth of Wikipedia:
Implications for the Future
Bongwon Suh, Gregorio Convertino,
Ed H. Chi, Peter Pirolli
Augmented Social Cognition Area
Palo Alto Research Center

42. 1. What’re the Global Activity level patterns?
2. What’re activity patterns by Editor Classes?
3. Are the Population Sizes stable? Analysis of
Population by Editor Class

43. Number of Articles (Log Scale)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Modelling_Wikipedia’s_growth

44. Monthly Edits

45. Active Editors

46. Monthly Edits

47. *In thousands Monthly Active Editors

48. 1. What’re the Global Activity level patterns?
2. What’re activity patterns by Editor Classes?
3. Are the Population Sizes stable? Analysis of
Population by Editor Class

49. Monthly Edits by Editor Class (in thousands)

51.  Undoing the effects of one or more
edits
– The page being restored to a version
that existed sometime previously.
– Reverting may also refer to any action
that reverses the actions of other editors.
– Fighting vandalism
– This analysis exclude vandalism to
model “resistance”

52. Monthly Ratio of Reverted Edits

53.  Increased resistance from
the Wikipedia community to
activities by occasional
editors
 Disparity of treatment of edits
– Occasional editors have been
reverted in a higher rate
Photo: http://lianza2009.wordpress.com/

54. 1. What’re the Global Activity level patterns?
2. What’re activity patterns by Editor Classes?
3. Are the Population Sizes stable? Analysis of
Population by Editor Class

55. Monthly Active Editors

57. 1. What’re the Global Activity level patterns?
– No longer following an exponential growth curve.
– Logistic growth is now a better explanation
2. What’re activity patterns by Editor Classes?
– Middle class decreasing their proportion of edits
– Different editor classes experience differing
resistances
3. Are the Population Sizes stable?
– Middle class a smaller portion of the pyramid

58.  Exponential growth model
– Growth rate depends on the current N
dN
= r*N
dt
 Preferential Attachment: Edits beget edits
– The more number of previous edits, the more number of new
edits
€
– r, growth rate of the population

59.  Ecological population growth model
– r, growth rate of the population
– K, carrying capacity (due to resource limitation)
dN N
= rN(1− )
dt K
€

60.  Follows a logistic growth curve
New Article

61.  Carrying Capacity as a function of time.

62.  Biological system
– Competition increases as
population hit the limits of the
ecology
– Advantage go to members of the
population that have competitive
dominance over others
 Analogy
– Limited opportunities to make
novel contributions
– Increased patterns of conflict and
dominance

63.  Ecological growth model
– r, growth rate of the population
– K, carrying capacity (due to resource
limitation)
 r-Strategist
– Growth or exploitation dN N
– Less-crowded niches / produce many
= rN(1− )
dt K
offspring
 K-Strategist
– Conservation [Gunderson & Holling 2001]
– Strong competitors in crowded niches /
€
invest more heavily in fewer offspring

64.  People-ware
– Growing resistance to new content
– Coordination cost and bureaucracy
 Knowledge-ware
– Availability of easy topics to write about
 Tool-ware
– Quality of tools used by editors and admins

65. Monthly Ratio of Reverted Edits
ed.chi@parc.com
http://asc-parc.blogspot.com
Augmented Social Cognition Area
Palo Alto Research Center

69. Inception: 2001. Wikipedia now has over 13 million articles in 266 languages.

71. Remove Barriers
Source: Wikimedia Commons, Author: bigbug 21

72. Make it intuitive

73. Promote Public
Participation
More power to the people!

74. Usability Study

75. MEET GRACE
Medical Student
Everyday Wikipedia
Reader
"
"It’s really hard to see
what I changed."

76. MEET CLAUDIA
Database Administrator
Has made < 5 Wikipedia edits
“[I feel lost].
Did someone clean it
up on me?”

77. MEET SAURAB
Software Developer
Reads Wikipedia More than
Once a Week
“It’s much easier to
add my content to a
blog.”

78. MEET SHAUN
Student
Everyday Wikipedia
Reader
“I’m just gonna keep
trying here.”

79. MEET SEAMUS
Business Student +
Controller of a Non-Profit
Weekly Wikipedia Reader
“I’m not a programmer. I
know the letters P-H-P.”

80. Simplification Cleaning
Differentiation Navigation
Streamlining Tools
Help
User Profiling Messaging
Style Guide

81. Release Nicknames

82. Current Interface

83. Açai - Navigation

84. Açai - Toolbar

85. Açai - Toolbar

86. Açai - Search Result

87. 77% Beta Retention Rate

89. Babaco Design Concept

92. Citron
* Content folding
* Side-by-side preview
* Syntax highlighting

93. Author:
Luc Viatour
www.lucnix.be

94. Usability Wiki
usability.wikimedia.org
Naoko Komura
Email: nkomura@wikimedia.org
User: Shuhari

95. wikiHow Presentation
BayCHI October 13, 2009
Email: jack@wikihow.com
Twitter: @JackHerrick
Identi.ca: @Jack

96. - What is wikiHow
- Why people contribute
- Re-design

97. What is wikiHow?
• wikiHow is collaboration to build the
world's largest, highest quality, how-to
manual

98. Big Bang Theory on CBS

99. 17 MM Unique Visitors per Month
Growth of Unique Visitors
20,000,000
17,500,000
15,000,000
12,500,000
10,000,000
7,500,000
5,000,000
2,500,000
0

100. 0
10000
20000
30000
40000
50000
60000
70000
Jan-05
Mar-05
May-05
Jul-05
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Nov-05
Jan-06
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May-06
Jul-06
Sep-06
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Jan-07
Mar-07
May-07
Jul-07
Sep-07
Nov-07
Jan-08
Mar-08
62,000+ articles
May-08
Jul-08
Sep-08
Nov-08
Jan-09
Mar-09
May-09
Jul-09
Sep-09

101. 0
1000
2000
3000
4000
5000
6000
Jan-05
Mar-05
May-05
Jul-05
Sep-05
Nov-05
Jan-06
Mar-06
May-06
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Nov-07
Jan-08
Mar-08
May-08
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Mar-09
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4,500+ Editors with over 10 edits

102. - What is wikiHow
- Why people contribute
- Redesign

103. Why do people contribute to wikiHow?
• I think it is fun/entertaining (77%)
• I find it personally rewarding (75%)
• I love to give back (66%)
• I enjoy collaborating with others (60%)

104. Simplified reasons for contributing
#1 Fun
#2 Greater Meaning
#3 Collaboration

105. Making editing easier means more edits
Advanced editor Guided editor

106. Edit abandonment is the failure to have
fun

107. Simplified reasons for contributing
#1 Fun
#2 Greater Meaning
#3 Collaboration

108. Noble missions provide greater
meaning
• Wikipedia : An encyclopedia for every
person on the planet in their own language.
• wikiHow : Practical instructions to help
people solve the problems of everyday life.

109. Extending greater meaning:
Books to Africa

110. Greater meaning detractor: Advertising
Partial solution: Opt out ads

111. Going carbon neutral: A cautionary tale
• wikiHow went carbon neutral a few years ago. Temporarily
were the most popular carbon neutral website.
• Going carbon neutral added meaning for many in community
• But detracted meaning for others....

112. Simplified reasons for contributing
#1 Fun
#2 Greater Meaning
#3 Collaboration

113. Classes on Compassionate
Communication
• Classes on Compassionate Communication
(aka Non-Violent Communication)
o Taught by live instructors on phone
and online
o Free to wikiHow editors
o $250 to non-editors
• Goal to encourage civil, enjoyable
collaboration.

114. Classes on writing skills
• Offered free classes on general
writing skills taught by live instructors
from Gotham Writers Workshop.

115. Simplified reasons for contributing
#1 Fun
#2 Greater Meaning
#3 Collaboration

116. - What is wikiHow
- Why people contribute
- Redesign

119. Keep in touch
• wikiHow User:JackHerrick
• email: jack@wikihow.com
• Identi.ca : @Jack
• Twitter: @JackHerrick