[Vision2020] Keep MoscowWiki from becoming a ghost town

[Nils Peterson]

MoscowWiki is seeking contributors, in its ongoing effort to achieve a
critical mass

http://moscowwiki.editme.com

After the last wiki raising meeting, I approached the Intensive American
Language Center at WSU, thinking that its students would both represent the
perspective of international visitors to the Palouse, and have an interest
in the problem of communicating in written English. My pitch was that IALC
students become MoscowWiki contributors. We¹ll see....

An interesting paper on the issues of Wiki as a collabortaive medium
> http://www.stanford.edu/~andyszy/papers/wiki_world.pdf

> ³This leads to the problem of the wiki ghost town: an individual may want to
> start a wiki, but if  that wiki has no contributors, it may not be very
> useful. There is no instant gratification to be  found in starting a wiki; in
> fact, even new wikis started by the high-profile Wikimedia  Foundation, such
> as Wikinews, are slow to become useful. On the contrary, a blog with one or
> two readers can look just as good, and can be just as interesting to read, as
> a blog with  millions of readers. This lack of instant gratification is not
> just a ³marketing problem² to be  overcome in encouraging adoption of wikis.
> Rather, it is a question of usefulness that is  fundamental to wikis: each
> wiki must combat its own network effect, as a wiki is not useful  until it
> reaches a critical mass of contributors.²

> The author, Andy Szybalski, is a Masters student in Computer Science at
> Stanford University.  In addition to a lucid prose style, he has
> photographic and software talents;  see "Andy Szybalski home"
> <http://www.stanford.edu/~andyszy/>.



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