(Other people’s) Report from Wiki Wednesday

Palo Alto was a bit out of the driving range for me (heck, it was out of the driving range for Matt, and he lives in the big state), so I had to live vicariously through other people’s blogs for details on what Ryan Singel said about the Wired Wiki editing experiment. According to those reports, the experiment was a success.

Ryan Singel posted his own evaluation on Wired News earlier this morning after stopping by Wiki Wednesday to report to a crowd there. As the reporter who had to watch his 1000-word article explode and contract for over a week, his view is probably the one of most interest:

When the experiment closed, Wednesday afternoon, there were 348 edits of the main story, 21 suggested headlines and 39 edits of the discussion pages. Thirty hyperlinks were added to the 20 in the original story, and a sidebar of sorts, called the enumeration page, holds the overflow of information and links that could not fit into the main story.

While Ryan pointed out the obvious — a paid editor would have done better — the process opened his eyes to the positive contributions readers can have in the process of writing. In this case, a few new interviews, a broader picture of the medium, and some correction to facts. What was missing, though, was the art of being a professional writer. And for that, I don’t think the wiki is to blame. There is a lot of tacit knowledge and much communication that goes into writing any story. Professional writers tend to be better at exercising the former and, being internalized, don’t have as much need for the latter.

Ross Mayfield was one of the communal editors. His take on the project includes a number of nice observations, both on the final story (and sidebar) and the Los Angeles Times Wikitorial. It is an interesting comparison, particularly when comparing the community intervention and the lack of leadership in guiding the process.

For myself, I did my token edit early and then waited until the final day to come back for more. By the time I arrived, the rambling list of links that had been criticized a few days ago was lopped in two. Most of my changes were attempts to clean up the wording, adding a little content and making no real effort to remove the stiltedness of each section. The story was probably over-organized, and if I had to do it over again I would have boldly removed some of the sub-headings into just four sections: Intro, Wikis Good, Wikis Bad, Wiki Future (albeit with better names).

I believe there were some tacit knowledge factors of my own dictating what I didn’t do, though. With over a week to play with it, the area of greatest impact was perceived to be at the end, where the editor was likely to take over and the content stuffing would be mostly done. There was some sense of responsibility for the outcome; I didn’t want the end result to be a bloated Wikipedia article. Even if I didn’t fix everything (I never saw the piece at its fattest state), I wanted to improve the low-hanging fruit based only on what I saw. Since I wasn’t engaged in the editing from start to finish, I took at face value the veracity and importance of what I saw, assuming in most cases that Ryan was responsible for the content and giving it more weight than it was probably worth. I feared adding the personality I discussed yesterday believing that it would be lopped away by the next editor.

As I start to type up another wiki research project of my own, this issue of duration comes up. It was important that there was a deadline to observe; the results would have been considerably different if this piece was billed as a living document with no end in sight. But I wonder if the time frame was actually too long. If Ryan looks to push for this kind of reader contribution in the future, perhaps a ritualistic Wiki Weekend of editing would suffice. Less fluff, more engagement, better quality.