Angela Beesley – Wikis and community collaboration
A presentation given at Web Directions South, Sydney Australia, September 27 2007.
Presentation slides
Session description
Wikipedia has brought the concept of a wiki to many people’s attention and now Wikia is aiming to broaden that concept. If you think of Wikipedia as the encyclopedia, then Wikia is the rest of the library. Wikia hosts 3000 openly editable wikis that are built up by communities of fans who are passionate on topics that range from solar cooking to Neopets.
In this session, Angela Beesley will explain how Wikia is not only hosting but actively developing wikis and creating hundreds of thriving communities. The methods and processes that have led Wikipedia to be the world’s largest encyclopedia can be adopted for any type of wiki use, including educational and business communities. Using examples from successful online wiki communities, Angela will explain how to enable a wiki community to manage itself, and how to minimise the common problems that wikis have, including ways to deal with unhelpful or unreliable information, lack of adoption of a wiki, and the problems of malicious edits on open wikis.
About Angela Beesley
Angela Beesley is a founder of Wikia, the community-focused wiki hosting site which is developing over 2500 wikis. Angela is the Vice President of Community for Wikia and manages a remote team of community support staff located across five continents. Additionally, Angela is Chair of the Advisory Board of the Wikimedia Foundation, the non-profit organisation responsible for Wikipedia, Wikibooks, Wikinews, and the other Wikimedia projects. She contributed a chapter on managing wikis to the book “Wikis: Tools for information Work and Collaboration” which was published in 2006, and has been involved with Wikipedia since early 2003. Her blog can be found at WikiAngela.
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