@jonny All of the wikis have the same interface, though. I think we should still expect that wikis that do a better job of communicating to perform better, right?
We did find that talk pages were being used, with (IIRC) a median of ~85 edits.
@jonny All of the wikis have the same interface, though. I think we should still expect that wikis that do a better job of communicating to perform better, right?
We did find that talk pages were being used, with (IIRC) a median of ~85 edits.
Another possible explanation is that online communities struggle to act as organizations. While organizations perform lots of functions, coordinating work and socializing members are some of the most important.
Maybe online communities fail so often because the anonymous, text-based, asynchronous nature of online interactions makes it tough to perform coordination and socialization functions, and so they just fall apart.
There are certainly many factors. One is that most topics are niche and even founders don't expect them to become large communities (https://doi.org/10.1145/3025453.3025639).
The vast, vast majority of attempts to build communities online (open source projects, wikis, subreddits, etc.) don't really go anywhere. Very few get more than a few contributions from a few contributors. Why do so many fail?
🧵 about our newly published paper (with @aaronshaw and @mako)