It occurred to me that a recent interest of mine had got me using a wiki, and that the experience was satisfying and the results of it were useful.

I do a lot of walking and cycling and so have an interest in maps. Having got a GPS navigation device, I was interested in getting maps (though maps on the smaller devices aren't very usable for actual navigation) and came across www.OpenStreetMap.org which is a great big open source map of the world based on a Wiki approach, albeit with specialised mapping software.

To my surprise, it is accurate and pretty complete for the areas I am interested in, though missing just enough that it has suckered me in to contributing. Of course, in the UK we have some of the best maps in the world with the publicly funded Ordnance Survey, so it is interesting to have something where I can measure the results of a public work against a professional source - even more so because the OS released some of their mapping into the public domain so people have been able to link the two together.

Thoughts are that this is a Wiki with a pretty clear set of goals, the only conflict seems to be cyclists vs walkers vs motorists where there is still a little bit of clarity required. The other noticeable thing is that the administration of the project is virtually invisible. I've been poking around for a couple of months and simply have not seen anything of what might appear to be management - the Wiki is just magically there and it works. The mailing lists are the model of civility (in the real sense of the word!). People and companies are producing tests and checks to validate the quality of the mapping, and even over a couple of months you can see the end product getting more refined.

Has anyone else any involvements in wikis that really work and are producing measurable quality output? What are their defining characteristics?

Interesting post. I can think of a few wikis that work 'really well' in a sense but I came unstuck on your 'measurable quality output'. Scepticwiki http://skepticwiki.org/index.php/Main_Page is quite good.

Defining characteristic: a small-ish group of dedicated people who have a clear common goal. Much as Wikipedia started out. It's when it becomes large it turns into a nightmare. Compare

(1) Party of friends you invited, have a bit too much to drink and gets slightly out of control, but only slightly, and everyone had a good time and remembers it in a positive way.

(2) Party your children invited via Facebook. 2,000 teenagers turned up, threw slates off the roof, vomited on the Hockney prints, tore up and then urinated on some rare books, every window smashed, later the police turned up and many arrests plus one or two people beaten to a pulp, several knifings. Three 15-year olds now pregnant.

Which compares best to Wikipedia?

Which mailing lists have you been reading? Surely not the one that was referred to as a "men's locker room" in this email. You know, the one where the founder of the project regularly gets into flamewars with contributors.

OSM reminds me a lot of Wikipedia before it got really really popular (back when it was Slashdot popular but not Steven Colbert popular).

The nice ones

Lack of anonymity, lack of Jimbo's Five Pillars, and lack of community election of wikicops. OTHER THAN THAT, a mediawiki is a mediawiki.

The "no apparent management" is interesting. This must indicate a proprietor who deals with any kind disruption with unilateral dispatch without discussion or even acknowledging any problem. This cuts off any opportunities for the "community" to get all meta on his/her ass. Given the narrow focus and clear goals there might be very little conflict to suppress in any event.

You might have made the best possible counter to my belief of "no good wikis."

A wiki can work when it is used as a tool for collaboration by people who already share a common purpose and common philosophy, and when there is already a strong sense of community amongst the collaborators, and they already have experience in resolving disputes amicably, or at least efficently, among themselves. However, if these things are not already in place, adding a wiki will not make them appear, and in fact the wiki will actually make their absence more strongly felt.

I think I've said several times before that the only real alternative to Wikipedia is not another monstrosity with slightly tweaked rules (if it's lucky enough to become a monstrosity rather than languish as an unnoticed project) but a proliferation of smaller niche-Wikis specializing in particular topics. Hopefully, as a particular niche-wiki establishes a reputation for accuracy it could beat out the Wikipedia monster in google ratings (or maybe even help to improve it from the outside).

The crappy ones would go where lots of Wikipedia articles should go. Maybe that's being optimistic


Basically there's sort of diseconomies of scale here.

I've mentioned ganfyd before and I've used it as a basis for my graph/article of the Preston Curve though as a non-medical professional I can't guarantee it 100%, though as an outsider looking in it looks a lot better than most parallel Wikipedia articles.

Economics has the New Palgrave online dictionary, based on a very excellent book series of the same name though I don't know if that's really in the Wiki model. (Edit: nm, being registered, I totally missed the fact that you got to register to read it. It's a different beast)

I've also lived in a city which had its own wiki which was quite helpful though the talk page discussion did have some Eastside-Westside kind of smack talk on them (though nothing like the level of viciousness you see on Wikipedia, and nobody got banned - hell, Wikipedia is easily the most nasty internet community I've ever been a part of despite or probably because of its explicit rules on CIVILITY and AGF)

Also, in retrospect, the EEML should've been done simply as an open Wiki with a focus on Eastern European history and politics rather than a mailing list. People could've discussed and worked on articles they liked without all of it seeming 'cabal-y'

This is also something I've said before but there are, or at least used to be, areas on Wikipedia where this kind of atmosphere can exist. I used to edit just Economics topics and people there argued, sometimes called each other names and reverted each other 5 or 6 times a day - but nobody ever reported anybody, nobody tried to get anybody banned and all the arguing and edit warring was just seen as a natural part of the 'dispute resolution' process. People argue, that's human nature. It's how the arguments are settled that matters. Then I made the mistake of editing an article related to Eastern European history and all of sudden people were filing frivolous reports left and right and trying to get me banned.

You can blame some of this on "nationalism" but that's only a part of the story, maybe not even the major one. Rather, it's really a form of "path dependence". Some creepy character back in the day stirred up a lot of troubles, poisoned the atmosphere and radicalized everyone active in a particular topic and their friends are still finding the battles to this day. For example on articles on Polish-Ukrainian topics there is/was a good bit of cooperation mixed with lively debate, despite the fact that there's A LOT there to fight about. On the other hand, on Polish-Lithuanian topics, where there's much much more rl reasons for folks to be friendly to each other, there's basically no hope whatsoever of it ever being a nice place to edit. The whole Gdansk/Danzig and Copernicus things are another obvious example.

I suspect that the GPS wiki escapes the problems of other wikis because by its very nature it cannot "atomized" the information. GPS addresses are discrete self contained packets of information. No one is going to be stepping on the first two digits of a posted address for a location. In a way it is as if WP editors had to submit complete articles in each edit. This weakens the market simulation aspect and helps avoid some of the worst dynamics.

There's also an objective measure of correctness: a given submission is either accurate, or it's not, and that's a determination that can be made reliably and repeatably by any reasonably sensible and intelligent person. There's no comparable way to evaluate Wikipedia articles for quality, as we all well know.

I'd like to think that Wikisource is a wiki which "works", and Open Library is no different. I think the key ingredient is a well defined scope, which is the anti-thesis of Wikipedia.

However all these small collaborative projects have the advantage of being young and/or small; many of them will likely develop the same problems as English Wikipedia if they allow their community to grow to the same size. Administrators are more responsible when they have the time to properly consider each issue rather than allow them to fester, or allow someone who has a vested interest to push it under a rug.

As a result, I think English Wikipedia needs to be split into smaller projects, and/or become a distributed system.

Given the current feudal system of wiki-projects (each able to set their own insular style guides and inclusion standards) that scenario already exists to some extent.

I'm not sure what you'd gain by balkanizing article groups further and onto separate wikis. In fact it seems to me as the software is currently designed this likely would involve duplicating content which doesn't fit cleanly into a particular discipline, while making navigation and linking more difficult and article histories impossible to follow with the same page(s) evolving in several places concurrently.

I suppose if one improves (re-writes?) the software to more seamlessly integrate the positive aspects of a wiki and address certain logistical issues, the prospect of splitting wikipedia into wikisports.org, wikiroads.org, wikimichigan.org, wikichurchyardelegies.org, and whatever the fuck-else* might be worth an experiment. You know, stuff like cross-wiki redirects, page-moves, transclusions, link coloration (based on page existence), unified watchlists, talk-page alerts (ye olde orange banner of doom), etc... a wide variety of little things to benefit readers and editors by dissolving the barriers (well, other than language) which lead most users to contribute only to one or two projects.

But look at which "cross-wiki" "features" they have implemented instead: global blocks, global user-rights, global blacklisting, etc. which only benefit stewards, (cough cough) lifeguards, and traffic cops while keeping The Man's foot lodged firmly in your ass wherever you roam.

Okay, so maybe I've jumped to undue conclusions here. Obviously I'd be interested to hear more about what you actually meant. Start a new thread if necessary.





* Yes, perhaps following an lang.foobar.wikipedia.org pattern would be saner... you'd probably have a huge "misc" or "impossible to categorize" section and/or a bunch of tiny ones in any case.

I had to smile at ye olde orange banner of doom. Yes, stangely enough, when you're an admin or higher, people do drop by on your TALK page to award you barnstars and kiss your ass. I've seen it happen. However, when you're a lowly nameuser without rank, people coming to your talk page are usually bearing news that is bad. If you're not being warned by somebody in power or notified that something or other you worked on is about to be deleted, somebody's there to object to something you did, and raise your blood pressure. It's like seeing the cop car lights in the rear view mirror-- probably THAT guy isn't pulling you over to award you the good citizen's medal, either.

I am once again reminded of one other non-prickish reason why people seek adminhood on WP. It's so the goddamn YOU HAVE A MESSAGE ON YOUR TALK PAGE thing doesn't look like a certified envelope bearing the return address of the Internal Revenue Service.

It's relatively easy to modify your user CSS so the Orange Bar of Doom isn't orange. In fact, you can even make it invisible if you want. I recommend this practice for people who truly wish to ignore drama.

The missing component is that the admins are not restricted to a WikiProject, which means that there is one governance model for the entire project, and that governance model is a mess. Smaller projects would have different governance models, tailored towards their content matter and contributor base.

In a proper distributed system, each page could have concurrent lines of development occurring on different projects, and in practise each project would develop rules and guidelines to assist in making that manageable.

To break free of the current model, the simplest approach would be to have one central wiki which is 'integration only - no content development'. Several well defined projects would be started, such as a BLP project, and a "current events" project, and the "current" en.wp project would become a 'miscellaneous' project for the rest (like you suggest). Once that stablises, well developed WikiProjects would break away.

Stop, fief:
You might notice a more typical admin laments being restricted to one wiki, and that their lack of authoriteh when pursuing opponents onto other WMF sites, or in isolated cases the whole internet.


Would that effectively mean one article about Reagan as an actor, and one about him as a politician? Solomon-like wisdom, I'd daresay.


Interesting choices as both wiki-projects (sorry, project-wikis) would be feeding content steadily back into the main heap as time progresses. I suppose the "integration only" wiki would consist mostly of redirects to other projects, to maintain consistent and predictable urls (which probably means they'd need to be updated automatically and immune to "RFD" or whatever fucked up bureaucracy spawns to replace it).

Not at all. Projects would be free to develop wild and wonderful forks, however the integration project would 'follow' the Reagan article on one project until such time as they decide that another project has developed a better article.

A properly distributed model would also encompass non-WMF project-wikis, some of which already exist and are producing better quality content than English Wikipedia in the discipline they have chosen to focus on.

I don't expect this idea will be met with approval from the WMF or the "typical" English Wikipedia admins who want to control the whole bang lot. However there are sensible admins who want to take pride in managing a smaller area well, and they would be keen to adopt different policies which help them achieve that, and they would be pleased to no longer feel responsible for the problems that occur in other areas, letting those other areas develop different policies as needed.

The main hurdle for this properly distributed structure is that the people administrating the integration project would need to be good maintainers, selecting the "best" lines of development, which requires a different class of people than we currently have controlling English Wikipedia. In most cases this selection process would be a no-brainer, where there is only one "good" version among the many forks, but in contentious areas the selection process could be quite political.

One approach would be to give the current administrators the same administration rights on both the 'integration project' and the 'miscellaneous content project', mandate sysop activity levels on the integration project, and let the ducks fall where they may.


If scary transclusion is made feasible, the integration wiki could transclude the content from the project-wikis, or the whole versioning system could be moved into a distributed version control system like git-wiki. In the simplest implementation, the edit button on the integration wiki would be a link to the relevant project-wiki, and the availability of the edit button would be subject to the protection status on the relevant project-wiki for that page.