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[Jason Calacanis]

On Sat, May 31, 2008 at 1:12 PM, Sergio Monge <monge.sergio at gmail.com> wrote:
> Wikipedia had (has) a powerful universal mission behind: create the free
> universal online encyclopedia. A lot of folks will devote (in fact they
> do) their time to this non-profit vision. They probably won't do for a
> profit company.

We've got a couple of hundred folks adding links to the system a day
already, so it seems like folks will help build the system "for free."
Of course, as Jimmy says "no one works for free." They are getting
something out of it, it's different in each case.

Of course, we see the user participation as the icing on the cake.
We've got 400 paid folks helping build Mahalo (60 full-time), and that
staff will grow to a couple of thousand paid editors over the next
five years. Our vision is a New York Times or Dow Jones size staff
building the site, with the public keeping us honest/checking out
work.

> You don't want the horrible editors than then become poor and so on.
> Most of wikipedia is written by a small percentage of users: the core
> community. You don't need the a lot of little contributors. If you get
> the power-users, the great contributors, you can hope to get some
> quantity of quality content. But I insist, you don't have the vision,
> the universal mission of wikipedia. This is not about killer features.
> It's about human beings and... belive it or not... ethics.

I agree with all that. However, we have a paid staff looking at every
edit, so none of the bad edits will make it through, and it will cost
very little for us to deal with them (think pennies).

> I think you won't get much collaboration (except from SEO/spammers)
> unless you have a very enthusiastic, devoted community (as far as I know
> you are working on it but at this time is not true). Nevertheless, I can
> be wrong. I hope I am wrong. I really like your project. Good luck.

We've got a great core group of users right now who love to submit links.

You can see accepted links by person here:
http://www.mahalo.com/Special:Mahalosocialrank?type=a

and you can see recommend links here:
http://www.mahalo.com/Special:Mahalosocialrank?type=s

We've built a trust score based on these users contributions over the
last six months, so we know who we have to keep on an eye on (i.e.
folks with banned links), and we know who we should be hanging out
with and sending free beach blankets too. :-)

Over the next six months we will combine link reputation with Guide
Note (miniarticles in Wikia speak) trust score... that is, which of
your edits to the Guide Notes were accepted, declined, or banned.

> Kind regards,
> Sergio Monge

right back at you Sergio! What's your Mahalo profile page? add me!
http://www.mahalo.com/member/jasoncalacanis

best j
---------------------
Jason McCabe Calacanis
CEO, http://www.Mahalo.com
Mobile: 310-456-4900
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AOL IM/Skype: jasoncalacanis
My admin: admin at calacanis.com