Larry Sanger wrote:
but I'm sure your job was essential at the beginning of Wikipedia.
Yeah, sort of! Thanks for noticing. :-)
I don't know about "sort of". I think it was essential, and I think there's no question about it.
A real community is self-sustaining once it gets going. In the parlance of economics, there are network externalities to communities. As a potential member of a community, I want to participate where other people are participating.
If I visited a site with the idea of wikipedia, but no one else seemed to be there, I would quickly tire of it. But if lots of other people are there, it is exciting and fun.
This is why you'll tend to find only two kinds of "web forums" -- really busy ones, and really dead ones. There's a certain "threshold" that makes it worthwhile for people to come back day after day.
The neat thing about wiki, of course, is that the threshold is a lot lower than some other technologies. But there is still a threshold.
--Jimbo