Wikipedia is often cited as a phenomenon of peer production. Like many, I now use it daily. It’s interesting to note that there are a million registered users of Wikipedia (that’s not visitors to the site, but users who have created logins so that they can contribute to the wiki).
Of these, about one hundred thousand have contributed 10 or more entries.
A core of about five thousand users contribute frequently and keep the site running.
What this suggests is that for a rollout of a collaborative wiki, say in an intranet environment, we can expect 10% of the user base to make a useful degree of contribution (lets call them the ‘peer producers’) and about 1/2 % to become frequent contributors (let’s call them the ‘mass collaborators’).
From this we can, perhaps, derive some figures on the minimum community size needed to create an effective wiki.
Personally, I would say for a good robust in-house Wiki you’re going to need about 50-100 users from the overall the user base to get really hooked on it, make regular updates, monitor other updates, correct errors and opinionated entries and so on (the ‘mass collaborators’). Anything less that this and it’s not going to really get traction.
50-100 mass collaborators is going to suggest 1000-2000 peer producers and a necessary overall user base of 10,000 to 20,000. Roughly this is going to produce a Wiki of 1,500 to 3,000 pages (wikipedia has over 10 million pages, about 2.3 million in English).
It’s fair to say, then, that a wiki ***properly*** rolled out to an intranet of 15,000 users is going to produce about 0.2% of the knowledge as contained in Wikipedia.
Knowledge Management, Collaboration & Sharing 
Leave a comment