Through my affiliation with ArborWiki.org, I was approached by a guy that wants to start a city wiki for Canton, MI. He had some specific questions about starting a city wiki and building momentum. Here is my response, which I felt is appropriate for anybody wishing to start a wiki:

The RichmondWiki project is largely influenced by the Arborwiki success in terms of content volume and community participation. I’m a few years behind, so we don’t have as much content or as many active contributors but we’re getting there. I would suggest finding a “coalition of the willing” (friends, family, techies, etc.) that can share moderation and content seeding responsibilities. Only a small percentage of normal visitors will actually know how/care enough to edit an article. You will likely end up relying on a small cadre of regular editors and a few drop-ins. I have found that aggregating local content works well to get some attention from the local bloggers and tech folks. My best examples are the list of Haunted Houses (http://www.richmondwiki.org/wiki/Haunted_Houses) and Tacky Lights Tours (http://www.richmondwiki.org/wiki/Tacky_Lights_Tours) that are seasonal favorites in Richmond.

I started my MediaWiki adventure by reading the Mediawiki book listed on the project blog. It gave me enough info to feel comfortable deploying and administering the MW installation. Other than that, it’s all about content. Figure out what works in your area and push it to local bloggers, news sources, etc. Keep adding content even when it seems nobody else is paying attention. Eventually you will find the right mix that Google likes and the natural search engine traffic will bring enough visitors and new contributors to push you over the hump so the project doesn’t rest solely on your shoulders.

I could add a lot more to this list based on my experience. Perhaps a future post.

Related posts:

1. 5 Cool Uses for Civic Wikis I’ve spent a lot of time looking at other local wikis lately to try to generate ideas for The RichmondWiki Project. Here are some of the cooler features I’ve come across: Mapping the streets: ArborWiki’s Streets of Ann Arbor project. Listing community events: ChesterWiki’s Events calendar. What happened on this date: BhamWiki’s Dates tracker. Aggregating......
2. Circuit City Alumni Resources Article Richmond suffered a huge loss today with Circuit City announcing its liquidation. “Liquidation” is just a euphemism for going out of business. It now goes from being one business on the brink to 30,000+ soon-to-be out-of-work people. A financial story to a human story. These “unwilling alumni” will soon be looking for jobs, trying to......
3. Partnership with ArborWiki.org Even though I’ve known these guys for a while, RichmondWiki.org and ArborWiki.org have decided to share analytics and insights gained to improve our respective civic wikis. ArborWiki is a more established wiki that serves Ann Arbor, MI. It is run by Matt Hampel, a student at the University of Michigan. Other administrators are actively involved......

I just installed Piwik, an open source website analytics package. It is running alongside Google Analytics to give us another set of data to track the wiki’s performance and visit statistics.

Why, you might ask? Well, mainly just for fun. Google Analytics is great and provides the basis for our monthly Site Statistics posts. But since my day job includes website analytics consulting, I’m always looking to learn about different systems and new ways of collecting and interpreting data. After all, if you can’t measure it you can’t manage it.

Plus, it allows us to do cool things that GA doesn’t, like embed widgets with real-time site usage data. Here’s a sample showing visits to RichmondWiki.org:

Look for more posts soon about Piwik vs. Google Analytics.

Related posts:

1. Usage Stats 9.26.08 Date Range: 9/1/08 – 9/25/08 Usage Statistics Visits: 161 Pageviews: 1,769 Avg. Pageviews: 10.99 Top Content Page Pageviews /wiki/Main_Page 349 /wiki/Special:Recentchanges 70 /blog/ 60 /wiki/Category:Blogs 40 /wiki/Tobacco_avenue 33 /wiki/Category:Bars_and_Restaurants 30 /wiki/Bandito’s_Burrito_Lounge 21 /wiki/RichmondWiki_Blog 21 /wiki/Capitol_Ale_House 20 /wiki/The_Fan_District 19 I am working on other ways of importing more data directly from Google Analytics, either via email......
2. Easter By Any Other Name Here’s a great example of “The Long Tail” theory of organic search engine traffic in action. The Long Tail theory states that a small subset of keywords receive huge amounts of search volume (i.e. “Britney Spears“) while millions more are searched less frequently individually but account for more search volume in aggregate (i.e. “what was......
3. June 2009 Site Statistics The Richmond Wiki received 1,574 visits in June 2009, up 35% from May (which was a slow month). It was a good month for social media traffic thanks to a lot of activity around the Social Media Club article, started by Bradley Robb. In fact, 9.8% of the total visits resulted in an article edit......

Visits to the wiki increased 20% over August and most of the other site usage metrics (pages per visit, time on site, etc.) improved as well. Additionally, 12.55% of visits resulted in a “goal conversion”. In our case, that means a new account setup, an edit made to an article, or a user login.

September 2009 Site Stats (click to enlarge)

Most Viewed Pages

Top Referring Sources

Related posts:

1. March 2009 Site Stats Traffic to RichmondWiki was strong in March. In fact, the site received 1,976 visits during the 31-day period (3/1 – 3/31), as compared to 1,200 in the 31 days prior (+64%). The average visitor spent over 2.5 minutes on the site and viewed 4+ pages. In the web world, that’s considered pretty good! Especially for......
2. February 2009 Site Stats Total traffic to the wiki was down slightly in the 4 weeks of February as compared to the previous 4-week period in January, but not by much. The biggest decline was in “Direct Traffic” (-24%), which is the number of visits from users who typed the domain name directly into their browser’s address bar. Visits......
3. May 2009 Site Stats Traffic to the Richmond Wiki slowed considerably in May (total visits down 50% from previous 31-day period) for two primary reasons: There was a huge lift in traffic in April related to the Monument Avenue Easter on Parade. May did not have a comparable article. I did not have enough time to keep adding and......

Ahhh, the late summer slowdown. Like our collective productivity levels, the wiki has been relatively quiet.

August 2009 Site Stats (click to enlarge)

Most Popular Pages

There were 33% fewer pageviews in August than July. Bounce rate improved (went down) and Average Time on Site improved (went up). Last year, traffic dramatically increased in the fall due to the popularity of the list of haunted houses in Richmond. I am fairly certain we’ll see even more traffic because of it this year.

Here are the most popular pages on the site for August 2009:

Top Referral Sources

The following sites and sources drove the most traffic to the wiki in August:

Related posts:

1. September 2009 Site Stats Visits to the wiki increased 20% over August and most of the other site usage metrics (pages per visit, time on site, etc.) improved as well. Additionally, 12.55% of visits resulted in a “goal conversion”. In our case, that means a new account setup, an edit made to an article, or a user login. Most......
2. May 2009 Site Stats Traffic to the Richmond Wiki slowed considerably in May (total visits down 50% from previous 31-day period) for two primary reasons: There was a huge lift in traffic in April related to the Monument Avenue Easter on Parade. May did not have a comparable article. I did not have enough time to keep adding and......
3. July 2009 Site Stats Nice job, Richmond! Traffic to the wiki is continuing to climb, despite the traditional summer slowdown in general web traffic. Visits to the site increased 7% over the previous 31 days (5/31 – 6/30) but engagement levels were down (time on site, average page views per visit, bounce rate). Here’s the breakdown: /h2> Most Popular......

Do you find yourself scared to trust anything you read on Wikipedia? If so, good for you! “Trust, but verify” has been one of my favorite sayings since I heard it from my grandfather when I was a kid.

The concept of “trust” and “reliability” are recurring themes in the wiki world. After all, if anybody can edit an article, how can users be assured that everything (or anything) they are reading is accurate, sourced, credible, trustworthy, unbiased and neutral? Inaccurate data on a wiki can come from anywhere: spammers, incorrect third party sources, out-of-date information, unsourced information or simple carelessness.

Enter WikiTrust

Enter WikiTrust, a MediaWiki extension developed at the University of California at Santa Cruz. When enabled by a user, it literally highlights newer and less credible content in a wiki article. According to a recent article in WIRED magazine,

An optional feature called “WikiTrust” will color code every word of the encyclopedia based on the reliability of its author and the length of time it has persisted on the page.

This is useful for a variety of reasons, but primarily to identify particular words, sentences or sections of Wikipedia articles that are deemed less “credible” than others. This doesn’t mean that they are inaccurate or biased. It simply means that the content either comes from a less trusted editor or hasn’t been around as long as the surrounding content.

Here’s how it looks in practice:

WikiTrust in Action

Look for this feature to appear in Wikipedia in the coming months.

Related posts:

1. Wikipedia Hiring for Usability Initiative Brion Vibber, CTO of the Wikimedia Foundation, announced on the MediaWiki mailing list and blog that the Foundation opened three positions for a new usability initiative, part of which includes WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editing tools, previously mentioned on this blog. I’m very happy to announce that the Wikimedia Foundation is......
2. Wikipedia Article in MIT Tech Review I came across this interesting article in MIT’s Technology Review. Simson Garfinkel takes an in-depth look into Wikipedia’s inner workings and the people and policies that make it hum, noting the good (breadth and depth of information) with the bad (lack of verifiability and the fact that many people rely on Wikipedia as truth). Given......
3. Wikipedia for Journalists and Bloggers Mark Dilley Steven Walling from AboutUs.org put together a great presentation for journalists and bloggers on how to appropriately, effectively, and intelligently use Wikipedia as a resource. I think one of the opening slides sums it up the best: “Wikipedia will give you the questions you should ask, not the answers.” The slides are embedded......

Today’s fun stat:

Only about 2/3 of RichmondWiki’s visitors are from the Richmond metro area. The wiki draws a fair amount of traffic from Northern Virginia and Tidewater as well.

This chart from Google Analytics shows the distribution of visits for the year to date (1/1/09 – 8/23/09):

Virginia Visits (click to expand)

Another oddity? Fully 10% of the wiki’s visits are from outside the US! Hello Latvia!

Related posts:

1. February 2009 Site Stats Total traffic to the wiki was down slightly in the 4 weeks of February as compared to the previous 4-week period in January, but not by much. The biggest decline was in “Direct Traffic” (-24%), which is the number of visits from users who typed the domain name directly into their browser’s address bar. Visits......
2. Usage Stats 9.26.08 Date Range: 9/1/08 – 9/25/08 Usage Statistics Visits: 161 Pageviews: 1,769 Avg. Pageviews: 10.99 Top Content Page Pageviews /wiki/Main_Page 349 /wiki/Special:Recentchanges 70 /blog/ 60 /wiki/Category:Blogs 40 /wiki/Tobacco_avenue 33 /wiki/Category:Bars_and_Restaurants 30 /wiki/Bandito’s_Burrito_Lounge 21 /wiki/RichmondWiki_Blog 21 /wiki/Capitol_Ale_House 20 /wiki/The_Fan_District 19 I am working on other ways of importing more data directly from Google Analytics, either via email......
3. September 2009 Site Stats Visits to the wiki increased 20% over August and most of the other site usage metrics (pages per visit, time on site, etc.) improved as well. Additionally, 12.55% of visits resulted in a “goal conversion”. In our case, that means a new account setup, an edit made to an article, or a user login. Most......

I recently added a new twitter widget extension to RichmondWiki that allows contributors to add a real-time Twitter feed to any article. It is a slightly modified version of the widget offered by MediaWikiWidgets.org.

Simply copy this into the edit window on any page, replacing SMCRVA with your username:

{{#widget:Twitter
|user=SMCRVA
|count=5
}}
[[Category:Twittering]]

Click “Save” and you’re done! The end result is a pre-formatted template and an automatic listing on the Twittering Category page:

RichmondWiki Twitter Widget

See the live example on the Social Media Club page.

Related posts:

1. RichmondWiki on Twitter, List of Richmond Twitterers RichmondWiki is on Twitter! Follow us here @RichmondWiki for site updates, announcements, and to let us know what you are up to. I couldn’t find a single, comprehensive list of Twitter users in Richmond so I created one on RichmondWiki simply by adding people that I follow and that follow me on my personal account:......
2. Add New Articles with Forms RichmondWiki.org is easier to update than ever. The wiki now allows anybody to add a new article simply by filling out a form. The first two forms available are for businesses and restaurants. You can access them here: Add a business Add a restaurant Instructions: Three Monkeys Example To create a new article for  a......
3. Template:Stub I added a “Stub” template tonight and applied it to a few dozen articles that are in need of some more content. By creating this template, RichmondWiki editors can easily find articles categorized as stubs and contribute more content to them. It might also encourage average readers to add some content as they realize it......

Congratulations to Wikipedians (and users) all over the world. The milestone 3 millionth English language article was added to the online encyclopedia recently. The topic? Norwegian actress Beate Eriksen.

A few other interesting statistics from Wikipedia’s list of international wikipedias:

• There are 13,681,782 articles in 271 languages
• 18,892,787 users have contributed 748,357,219 edits
• There are 1,810,224 images in wikipedia

(Data was pulled on 08:30 on 8/17/09)

Related posts:

1. Wikipedia Article in MIT Tech Review I came across this interesting article in MIT’s Technology Review. Simson Garfinkel takes an in-depth look into Wikipedia’s inner workings and the people and policies that make it hum, noting the good (breadth and depth of information) with the bad (lack of verifiability and the fact that many people rely on Wikipedia as truth). Given......
2. How to Tell if Wikipedia Content is Trustworthy Do you find yourself scared to trust anything you read on Wikipedia? If so, good for you! “Trust, but verify” has been one of my favorite sayings since I heard it from my grandfather when I was a kid. The concept of “trust” and “reliability” are recurring themes in the wiki world. After all, if......

Nice job, Richmond! Traffic to the wiki is continuing to climb, despite the traditional summer slowdown in general web traffic.

Visits to the site increased 7% over the previous 31 days (5/31 – 6/30) but engagement levels were down (time on site, average page views per visit, bounce rate).

Here’s the breakdown:

July 2009 Site Statistics (click to enlarge)

Most Popular Articles

Many of this month’s most popular articles were promoted in various social networks (mainly Twitter). Additionally, the timeliness of the July 4th Fireworks article led to a nice spike in organic search engine traffic. Finally, the prominence of the Belle Isle article has to do with some tie-ins to the article on Wikipedia (and the nice weather).

Here are the top 25 most viewed pages from July:

Top Referral Sources

Last month’s traffic seems to skew heavily towards “direct” visits (people typing a URL into their browser) but this is slightly misleading. A significant portion of the “direct” visits are actually from shortened URLs on social networking sites like Twitter.

It is nice to see the growth in traffic from links placed in relevant Wikipedia articles.

Want Even More Data?

The RichmondWiki Project is a public project, meaning you can request any of the site statistics that you are interested in. Simply leave a comment here or contact us.

Related posts:

1. May 2009 Site Stats Traffic to the Richmond Wiki slowed considerably in May (total visits down 50% from previous 31-day period) for two primary reasons: There was a huge lift in traffic in April related to the Monument Avenue Easter on Parade. May did not have a comparable article. I did not have enough time to keep adding and......
2. February 2009 Site Stats Total traffic to the wiki was down slightly in the 4 weeks of February as compared to the previous 4-week period in January, but not by much. The biggest decline was in “Direct Traffic” (-24%), which is the number of visits from users who typed the domain name directly into their browser’s address bar. Visits......
3. August 2009 Site Stats Ahhh, the late summer slowdown. Like our collective productivity levels, the wiki has been relatively quiet. Most Popular Pages There were 33% fewer pageviews in August than July. Bounce rate improved (went down) and Average Time on Site improved (went up). Last year, traffic dramatically increased in the fall due to the popularity of the......

In a post meant to incite controversy, Ars Technica writer Jeremy Reimer declared Microsoft Word dead and declared wikis (MediaWiki, in particular) the new champion of word processing.

I disagree, and I’m not the only one.

I happen to like MediaWiki but even RichmondWiki’s internal stats show that only a small percentage of visitors are likely to edit an article. The number one reason is the difficulty and learning curve of the editing process. For better or worse, MS Word has evolved to a point where it epitomizes the UI and functional “conventions” of what a word processor should do. The vast majority of people have a certain comfort level with the Word interface despite its bloated and often counter-intuitive feature set.

Until MediaWiki’s WYSIWYG interface is fully functional and ready for public consumption, I don’t foresee the masses abandoning MS Word in favor of MediaWiki. Cloud-based, collaborative document editing programs such as Google Docs or Zoho are more likely contenders to gain market share because:

1. Both programs allow for simultaneous editing by multiple authors (So does MediaWiki)
2. Both programs have version control so previous versions are always available (So does MediaWiki)
3. Both programs adopted the GUI standards that offline word processors melted into our collective subconscious (MediaWiki is working on it, but it’s not quite there)
4. Both programs are integrated with other office software: spreadsheets, charting, email, slideshows, etc. (MediaWiki does not)
5. Neither program requires IT or server resources to set up, administer and upgrade (MediaWiki does)

Microsoft’s Office suite is destined for the cloud as well, so we’ll see how that goes. Let’s hope they get it right. Competition is a good thing for technology markets. But, for the time being, I’m afraid we’re all stuck with Clippy, that incessantly eager-to-please paperclip that does anything but actually help.

Related posts:

1. MediaWiki WYSIWYG Coming Soon As reported over on MatthewSim.com, a MediaWiki WYSIWYG editor is coming soon! This means that editing RichmondWiki will be even easier. If you can type in a Word document, you will be able to edit a wiki article. Editors will be able to toggle back and forth between WYSIWYG and normal wikitext modes. The new......
2. What Does The Wiki Need? Want to contribute to The RichmondWiki Project but don’t know where to begin? This is a good starting point: Special:Wantedpages The “Wanted Pages” report automagically lists the pages in a wiki that other contributors are asking for. While editing a wiki, it is possible to link to an article that doesn’t exist yet. These are......