On Thu, Jul 24, 2008 at 2:29 PM, Mehrotra, Niki (US - Chicago) nmehrotra@deloitte.com wrote:
Hi all,
I am new to Wikipedia and am involved in an organization that wishes to incorporate wiki-style features into an existing internal collaboration tool. I have looked into Wikipedia's structure and understand that all processes related to quality control are completely self-driven on the part of its contributors. What do you think motivates the average user to contribute as much as he or she does? What incentive do the individuals have to devote much of their time to monitor pages? One of our challenges will be getting our organization's members to use the wiki once we roll it out. Thank you for your time and help.
Regards,
Niki
Hi Niki,
As everyone else has said, there's a big difference between Wikipedia and corporate wikis, both in how they work and often in contributor motivation.
There's a book about how to start a wiki from scratch on Wikibooks: [1] http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Wiki_Science:How_to_start_a_Wiki
Other resources include "Wikipatterns," which is both a book and the website that Ben linked to, and the book "Wikis for dummies" (which I can't vouch for one way or another, but it does go into how to start your own wiki, including using software other than MediaWiki).
The site wikimatrix (www.wikimatrix.org) has a nice overview of the different wiki software options available as well, and their differences.
If you are interested in learning more about the motivations of Wikipedia contributors specifically, many academics have written about this topic (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_in_academic_studies). But the answers are as varied as the viewpoints of contributors themselves (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Wikipedia_essays).
best, Phoebe
[1] something the rest of us should contribute to! It's good but short, and could be substantially improved.