Social Computing

Golden rules of building Wiki community trust

David Dehghan — Thu, 22 Dec 2005 09:21:00 GMT

Here are some of my key leanings from the past few years of working with wiki communities. I will write more about each of these points in the future posts.

Use a license that maximizes content use. Give copyrights of the content back to the user.
Promote your active users to roles of greater and greater responsibility. Make them administrators, content police, editors, spellcheckers etc.
Create a space where all users can add value. Extract value form everyone: your readers, technical experts and language experts and the silent majority.
Design for participation. Simple interface, easy to use.
Don't enforce social norms with software .
Help the community define and evolve rules of cooperation.

Shortening URLs on MSWiki for better search engine ranking

David Dehghan — Thu, 22 Dec 2005 08:07:00 GMT

There is extensive documentation on Mediawiki on how to shorten the urls from www.yoursite.com/index.php?title=testpage to www.yoursite.com/testpage. After a few hours of research I was able to do just that on my Windows Server 2003 and IIS. It is probably wise to follow the URL pattern of wikipedia exactly so that in future software updates of Mediawiki your site will not break your site accidentally. The more customization you do to your site the more likely is that the development team on Mediawiki will not be testing your specific settings and will not be taking your modifications in mind as they write new code. So it will be safer to mimic wikipedia url pattern: www.yoursite.com/wiki/articlename

I have put this text on MSWiki so that it can evolve: http://mswiki.com/wiki/Short_URLs_for_better_search_engine_ranking

Step by step guide

URL Rewite

Install URL rewite for IIS
Download the zip file and unpack it somewhere on your server outside of wwwroot
Give Network Service account write privileges to above directory.
Configure the ISAPI ini file like below. Debug 1 will cause debug output to be written which will help you troubleshoot problems. Reload 5 means that the ini file will be reloaded at every 5 url redirection. This saves you from resrtting IIS every time you change this file.

Debug 1
Reload 5
#Browse LOT
RewriteRule ^/wiki/(.*) /index.php?title=$1

On the command prompt type iisreset +<enter>. Your re-director should be working now. Test it by navigating to www.yoursite/wiki/Main_Page.

Mediawiki settings

Modify MediaWiki localsettings.php to look like below. This will cause internal links on the page to also be shortened

$wgScriptPath     = "";
$wgScript           = "$wgScriptPath/index.php";
$wgRedirectScript   = "$wgScriptPath/redirect.php";
$wgArticlePath      = "/wiki/$1"

'Security Step' If everything is working now then revoke the write permission from Network Service where you saved your ISAPI filter. Then change the ISAPI ini to look like this

Debug 0
Reload 5000
#Browse LOT
RewriteRule ^/wiki/(.*) /index.php?title=$1

Some pages on your site will be cached by PHP or IIS and will still have the old style URLs. But eventually, with time or with editing of pages, the files in cache will be replaced.
The old style URL will be present for non existing pages. I think this is a bug in MediaWiki software. Even wikipedia has this problem.

An interview with Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia Founder

David Dehghan — Mon, 28 Nov 2005 22:38:00 GMT

The interview on C-span.

Some interesting points that I can very much relate to based on my experiences with http://www.wsuswiki.com and http://www.mswiki.com

Contributors to Wikipedia:

3000 authors that contribute more that 100 edits a month.
There are set of even more active users that make 1000s of edits a month which bar far, contribute the majority of the content on the site.
Wikipedia is ranked 40th on Alexa.

Who are the authors:

Smart friendly people with targeted knowledge. He really emphasized the idea of being a social person and enjoying collaboration with other people to create new content.
People who feel great for contributing to a great cause of documenting the human knowledge.

Amazon introduces Product Wiki

David Dehghan — Sun, 27 Nov 2005 19:49:00 GMT

A good move by amazon. They have created a wiki page for each of the items in their catalog. Research has shown that anything mentioned by independent sources about an item will increase customer confidence in that item. Even if the comment is negative.

Items with user comments on Amazon simply sell more. Many people read negative comments about a product or a vendor and simply dismiss it because they don't relate to the author. So if you can get people to say something about your product, anything really, it will increase your sales.

Customer comments are one way, wiki is another. They are complimentary.

Importance of a mission statement for the success of a wiki

David Dehghan — Sun, 16 Oct 2005 00:43:00 GMT

One the biggest drivers of user contribution to Wikipedia is clear mission statement they have. I have actually not read it and I am writing this blog in a airplane, but as a user and contributor to Wikipedia I have somehow got the message.

"Create a comprehensive and accurate free encyclopedia in 10 years."

Why Wikipedia has 10K+ active contributors?

Passionate contributors: They feel that they are participating in something that outlast their lives. When you add something there you are reasonable assured that it will outlive you. It is a way making history.

Large pool of authors: Everyone is a an expert. Everyone has something they are good at and want to pass that along. As individuals they may not be so smart but as a collective they are a genius.

Low barrier to entry to the author pool: The wiki collects and aggregates micro contribution for every users: In a successful and well maintained wiki you, as a contributor add what you can. You can forget about spelling grammar or style, if you have content and what to add it you can just dump it in. There will be others who clean it up and format it. If you are not an expert in a subject then you can contribute by simply formatting and editing. Just consuming the content is also a form of contribution. Page view statistics help authors focus their effort on a subset of content.

How not to miss your favorite radio show

David Dehghan — Sun, 10 Apr 2005 02:06:00 GMT

I listen to NPR religiously but sometimes I miss the shows that really like to listen to: Democracy Now, Alternative Radio, This American Life, etc.
I spent hours today looking for "TiVO for radio" to record shows for offline listening. Eventually I found exactly what I was looking for: http://radiotime.com

But since I am incredibly cheap when it comes to buying software, I kept looking for a free version of the same thing. Eventually I found a good alternative: http://www.publicradiofan.com which is a really cool service. It is a database 100s of radio stations and radio shows and it can tell you who is playing your favorite show and it gives you a link to its streaming content.

I may give in and pay the $39 yearly fee for the RadioTime. Their site UI was pretty simple to use and offline recording sound irresistible.

What is better than TiVO?

David Dehghan — Sun, 28 Nov 2004 14:35:00 GMT

I read in the news paper that TV networks just paid a few billion dollars to NFL for the rights to broadcast NFL games on their network. One of the reasons why they are willing to pay exorbitant money for broadcasting these games is that no one watches them with TiVo to skip the commercials. To the fans watching a game that is not live is less appealing than watching it commercial free. So they put up with the commercials to have a sense community and belonging with the other fans that are watching the game at the same time as them.

So my idea is for some software on your digital video recorder to cut out all the commercials in the live stream and replace them with segments of a movie or another pre-recorded show. © ;-) With this you can even watch 2 football games at the same time since a 3hr football came has less than 1.5 hours of actual content.

Human brain is fairly apt at following a movie along even if it is segmented into 3 min chunks. The software will take care of recognizing commercial interruptions and do the hard work of playing the pausing the movie. Perhaps it could even re-play the last 15 seconds of the movie so that you remember where it was left off.

I am sitting in Edmonton airport and thought about this idea. Thanks to the free internet provided by Bell Canada and Air Canada.

The Hole-In-The-Wall experiment

David Dehghan — Wed, 30 Jun 2004 18:47:00 GMT

The Hole-In-The-Wall experiment is one of the most amazing studies that show the ingeniousness of children. In 1999, Dr Mitra setup a computer with internet connection in the slums of India and watched children’s interaction with the computer. Only the monitor and the touch pad mouse was exposed to public though a hole in the wall in a public street. Dr Mitra then video taped people’s interaction with the ‘thing’ through a camera mounted to a tree across the street. Soon enough children discovered the computers and started to play with it. Without any instructions whatsoever the kids were able to discover MSPaint and start drawing and coloring. Children’s discoveries were astonishing, One day Dr. Mitra discovered that the kids had saved a document on the desktop that had the words “I LOVE INDIA” in it. He could not figure out how this document was created given the fact that the computer had no keyboard. Eventually one of the local boys showed him how it was done: The boy used the character map in Word to individually pick the letters and then increased the font size and colored the letters one by one. The kids had learn all this on their own.

They had no concept of files and programs. They had simply noticed that if they dragged and drop an mp3 icon on Windows Media Player icon music would start to play from the ‘thing’. They had no idea that the ‘thing’, as they called it, was a computer. They invented their own names for different things. They called mouse pointer sui, hindi for needle; they called the hourglass mouse pointer damru, hindi name for drums.

The fact that the computer interface was in English was not a hindrance to the kids at all. They were able to navigate internet and find and download hindi music mp3s. All this knowledge was passed through word of mouth between the kids.

The story of the Hole-In-The-Wall experiment has been out for a few years. You can find our more about it from here http://www.niitholeinthewall.com

Influence vs popularity

David Dehghan — Tue, 01 Jun 2004 03:13:00 GMT

Weblogs and Authority is an interesting way of deducing the influence that a blogger has on the blogging community versus his or her popularity.

We are just data processing nodes

David Dehghan — Thu, 06 May 2004 21:42:00 GMT

Notes from Neville Brody's talk at Microsoft. (He is a renowned graphic and brand designer)

The new information system [Internet, mail, blogs, etc] is forcing to act as data processing nodes. We process information and forward it to other nodes. The trend is toward faster and faster information generation and processing. However this information processing is fairly exhausting for our body and mind. At the end of the day we go home and we are exhausted. But then, when we look back at a day's worth of activity we don't see what we have accomplished with all the mental work.

Personalization is all about making us into more efficient information processing nodes.