Blog Entry

Two important principles of good collaborative tool design are:

• Augment patterns of collaborative behavior
• Observe how people use your tools, and evolve them accordingly.

These principles sound straightforward, but they are rarely practiced, and I’m always thrilled when I meet people who do practice them. I had the pleasure of meeting one such person at WikiWednesday earlier this month: Danny Horn, Senior Community Development Manager at Wikia.

As one of the founders of the Muppet Wiki (where you will find every detail ever known to man and then some about the Muppets), Danny knows about as much as anyone about Wikis (and the Muppets). He also happens to work at a company where they value his community expertise and are willing to apply it towards improving the tool.

A best practice in community building is the Welcome. It sounds so simple, it’s often underappreciated. It’s especially important in online communities, where there is no equivalent to a nod and a smile in the real world. The only way to welcome someone in an online community is to do it explicitly, and in healthy online communities — regardless of the tool — that is exactly what people do.

Danny understood this, and so he conceived of a simple feature. Whenever someone new edits a Wiki page, the tool automatically leaves a Welcome message for the user, thanking them for their contributions and encouraging them to ask questions. The message is signed by the last administrator who was active on the site.

The hypothesis behind this feature was that not only was the act of Welcoming important, but the act of Welcoming in a timely fashion was critical. The other smart thing that Danny did, besides conceive of this feature, was to evaluate whether or not this hypothesis was true. Here are the numbers:

• In the month since the feature has launched, it’s been leaving about 3,500 welcome messages a day, which means there are at least 3,500 new contributors to Wikia-hosted Wikis every day.
• Registered new accounts have gone up 9 percent. Logging in (versus staying anonymous) went up 18.6 percent.
• Anonymous contributors edited Wikia-hosted Wikis 16.5 percent more than previously. Logged-in contributors edited the Wikis 12.2 percent more.

Clearly, a simple and timely Welcome message is playing a huge role in increasing participation from newcomers. We can easily speculate on why this has been the case, but Danny did us one better. He tested his hypothesis by evolving the tool and measuring its impact. It’s a simple approach that leads to better tools, and we would all do well to follow suit.

Categories: Stories