[WikiEN-l] Questions regarding Wikipedia users' motivation

[phoebe ayers]

On Thu, Jul 24, 2008 at 2:29 PM, Mehrotra, Niki (US - Chicago)
<nmehrotra at 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.