Wiki Community/Future/Builders and Commenters

To me, there appear to several different styles of use for the wiki. A single editor may have aspects of several of these categories, often even in a single edit. They can be grouped as follows:

Builders — People who contribute a lot of original content, and/or ensure that the content is pretty/accurate/up-to-date. Includes gnomes and more casual users.

Page Starters — Starts new pages, expands the floorspace of the wiki
Content Adders — Add content to pages
Copy Editors — Improve the presentation of the content
Photographers — Take photos and upload them
Gnomes — Take care of linking, renaming and other organizational tasks

Commenters — Those who primarily use the wiki to comment on content that already exists. Includes restaurant reviewers and in-depth political discussers.

Reviewer — Adds their reviews
Information Seeker — Leaves questions using the comment macro

Newbies — How do I change web?
Spammers — Ch33p V1agra nao.

Builders and Commenters create the vast majority of the wiki's content, and are the the subject of this entry.

I started with the early set of people on Davis Wiki, where most of what we were doing was building the wiki up from scratch. Over time, we were pretty successful and have now built up some 15,000 pages. More recently, a lot of the users that we attract are simply commenting on what has already been developed, and their contributions have more truthiness and less facts. Now I've never been on the pro-NPOV anti-negativity crew, but it seems like a lot of contributions don't really add to the wiki, and create a jumbled mess. So I have two questions:

What do we do with all of the comment junk that has been building up on pages? Do we want to save everyone's voice, or just keep the best, most representative opinions?
How do we turn Commenters into Builders?

If you have ideas about software, you can include those too. (But we are not putting in a star rating system for businesses, we are not Yelp, and I veto that as board chair.) —BrentLaabs

Archive the comments into comment archives, and have a more active outreach. Also: Allerbot —StevenDaubert

Alas, I don't think a bot will quite replace Jason. (edit Luckily, he seems to have returned) -jw

I'm working on some formal documents, including use cases and have at least nine, one of which is "The Factor X", which is the new activity that pops up one to five years from now. Keeping the categories loose (a la use cases) makes it easier to address editors/commenters, as they both have the same use case ("I want to add my view to this"), and it's just the tool used that creates a false distinction. The process is different, not the intent. The view present above results in thoughts of adapting to the tools rather than adapting the tools to the needs. If we want cohesive entries, create a tool, adapt a tool, add a tool, or throw away a tool. Education isn't really an option for hit and run "I was sick for a week" commentary, but people want to do it. -jw

I've always thought the shadiness factor was pretty cute (for lack of better word), but I don't think business owners would find it as amusing as the rest of us. On a completely unrelated note, I like the template (or template-should-be/template-soon-to-be) on the Black Bear Diner page that encourages additions instead of comments. —EBT

Business owners aren't more important than other people in the community... on the other hand, they aren't less important. So, if shadiness factor works for people, it works for businesses. YMMV on if it's okay to label a person shady, but that's not the specific point I'm making. Remove the sacred: businesses are just another part of the community, same as everything else. -jw

In the same vein, people talk about the 90-9-1 law in online communities. The law states that 90 percent of users lurk, 9 percent edit, and 1 percent actually build. How closely does this reflect our wiki?

The 1% (or 5%) rule was common long before the web existed, and probably dates back many thousands of years. In any kind of volunteer or open group, a small percentage of people do the work, and of those, a small percentage do the hardest work. I've seen it both in practice and commented on decades ago in community theater, the SCA, Rocky Horror casts, Science Fiction groups, con committees, various organizations for the blind, bands, church groups, scouting, fundraisers for a half dozen different organizations, and pretty much any event organization. I think it's simply an aspect of human organization. I'd even go so far as saying that it exists to varying degrees even in non-volunteer organizations like workplaces and families, although that is less consistently observable, as there are other pressures and constraints in effect. -jw