Sometimes a Wiki Just Does Not Work
August 5, 2008 | Written by Yan Shikhvarger
Wikipedia has become a hugely influential and highly usable online property. It is consistently in the top 10 web properties in terms of users and gets around 53M unique visitors per month (Comscore). That generates so many page views that even Google started a competing property – Knol. Of course there have been many other topical Wikis started based on this incredible success of Wikipedia. There are Wikis for something as broad as recipes and something as specific as sustainable transportation. It seems that Wikis do well at compiling a mass body of knowledge but lack the social ranking mechanisms that help to bubble up relevant content.
A good example where a wiki just does not seem to function well is the wiki for tourism or WikiTravel. The issue is that it just does not seem to be that useful. Yes, it has basic information on many destinations and what to see, where to eat, stay but the problem is that it is indistinguishable which item is better than the other because of lack of rankings. It is simply a list. A site like TripAdvisor however, and its massive community makes it easy to understand which are the better hotels, restaurants, sites, etc… This is a big negative for any Wiki model which just does not have a built in mechanism for ranking content
Just compare these pages for a destination like Brooklyn, and see where you will find some good ones…
Brooklyn’s restaurants from TripAdvisor
Brooklyn’s restaurants from WikiTravel
More from RFI Studios
- To Be Everywhere Online or Not? – Left Brain
- Got a mobile site? – Left Brain
- Will There Eventually Be Only One Website? – Left Brain
- ROI Modeling – Left Brain
- Keeping Content Fresh – Left Brain
Post Your Comment
(If you haven't left a comment here before, you may need to be approved by the site owner before your comment will appear. Until then, it won't appear on the entry. Thanks for waiting.)