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<TITLE>Keep MoscowWiki from becoming a ghost town</TITLE>
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<FONT FACE="Verdana, Helvetica, Arial"><SPAN STYLE='font-size:12.0px'>MoscowWiki is seeking contributors, in its ongoing effort to achieve a critical mass<BR>
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<a href="http://moscowwiki.editme.com">http://moscowwiki.editme.com</a><BR>
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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. We’ll see....<BR>
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An interesting paper on the issues of Wiki as a collabortaive medium<BR>
<FONT COLOR="#0000FE">> <a href="http://www.stanford.edu/~andyszy/papers/wiki_world.pdf">http://www.stanford.edu/~andyszy/papers/wiki_world.pdf</a><BR>
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</FONT></SPAN></FONT><BLOCKQUOTE><FONT FACE="Verdana, Helvetica, Arial"><SPAN STYLE='font-size:12.0px'><FONT COLOR="#0000FE">“</FONT>This 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 “marketing problem” 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.”<BR>
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> The author, Andy Szybalski, is a Masters student in Computer Science at<BR>
> Stanford University. In addition to a lucid prose style, he has<BR>
> photographic and software talents; see "Andy Szybalski home"<BR>
> <http://www.stanford.edu/~andyszy/>.<BR>
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