[Search-l] Edit any page

[Sergio Monge]

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.

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 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.

Kind regards,

Sergio Monge
www.sergiomonge.com

Jason Calacanis escribió:
> Quick update: we've made it so you can edit any page on Mahalo. My
> thinking below and on my blog:
> http://www.calacanis.com/2008/05/31/wikipedia-3-0-you-can-now-edit-any-page-on-mahalo/
>
> Interested to hear people's thoughts on mixing paid and free contributors.
>
> all the best, j
>
>
> Wikipedia 3.0: You can now edit any page on Mahalo
> The most powerful feature of Wikipedia is that anyone can edit any
> page at any time. This feature has allowed everyone to get involved,
> even if their contribution is bad. The brilliance of this move is that
> the bad editors grow to be poor editors, and then poor editors then
> become average editors, and over some period of time some small
> percentage of the bad, poor, and average editors become great.
>
> Over an extended period of time Wikipedia has grown to have 500 or so
> amazing editors. It took eight years, or 60 or so folks a year, but
> they did it. They converted one editor per week essentially.
>
> Guy Kawasaki joked with me a decade ago that he was famous for doing
> nothing and for saying obvious things. Self deprecation is always
> attractive to me, and despite the fact that Guy really has never had a
> "hit," he's picked up some brilliant observations over his years as a
> self-described undeserving pundit. The most powerful of which is his
> famous quip: "don't worry be crappy."
>
> Wikipedia is the perfect example of a site which doesn't worry about
> being crappy, but rather its ability to evolve. They've let folks
> destroy their accuracy and reputation in the hopes that the increased
> interaction will be a net positive in the future... and it has. Of
> course, BLPs (bios of living persons) wind up suffering in that
> "crappy" state while the Wikipedia evolves, but that's the price of a
> freewheeling system: some pain, but a lot of gain.
>
> I've been very resistant to letting user run amok inside of Mahalo
> over the first twelve months we've been around. As a journalist and
> writer myself I'm kind of a fan of good grammar, spelling, and
> factually accurate information. Call me crazy, but when I see a
> mistake it makes me go a little crazy. Then again, I'm old now (37)
> and these new kids aren't as hung up on the whole "fact checking"
> thing.
>
> A a month or so ago I had a huge political figure by my office and I
> was showing him how Wikipedia works. I change his nationality from
> Irish-American to Greek-American and he was stunned that the vandalism
> stayed up there for so long (five days). Of course, I had to change it
> back... so it's possible that it could have stayed there for a month
> or a year.
>
> Now that Mahalo has 50,000 pages (5x what we set out to do in the
> first year), and 400 paid contributors (4x what we thought we would
> have in the first year), we've decided to let folks edit Mahalo pages
> (see image on right).
>
> Now, it's not going to be as freewheeling as Wikipedia day one. We've
> got three major differences:
> You have to register and be logged in to edit a Guide Note. This is a
> major throttle on people contributing since the signup process takes a
> couple of minutes and an email address.
> Our staff is going to check ever edit made and confirm it is correct.
> We have three full-time folks on this right now and our expectation is
> we will only get 10-50 editors per day.
> You can edit your own pages, or a page about your company. Our
> thinking is since we're checking all the facts that's an OK thing to
> do. (Wikipedia does not let you edit your own page).
> If this goes well, then you can expect us to remove throttle number
> one. I'm interested to see where this goes.
>
> Oh yeah, if you haven't noticed we've updated 15,000 of our pages to
> have long Guide Notes that are super easy to scan. Think of them as
> mini-Wikipedia articles with just facts. They are 300 words compared
> to Wikipedia pages with 1,000 to 5,000 words.
>
> Of the 50,000 pages in the system we've got 60-70% to this new
> standard. Over the next six weeks we should have 100% of our articles
> to the long guide note standard. This is the goal of the company: to
> help you navigate the web quickly and accurately. We're a mashup of
> Wikipedia and Google: 50% content/facts and 50% curated links.
>
> Fred Wilson's partner Brad implored me to open up Mahalo when I
> pitched Union Square on the rough concept of what has become Mahalo. I
> told him no frackin' way, but my thinking has evolved. My thinking
> today is that you can blend the paid, top-down editorial model with
> the unpaid, open model--time will tell if we're right.
>
> Chris Anderson of WIRED magazine spoke at Mahalo yesterday and he told
> me I needed to re-brand Mahalo from "human-powered search" to
> something else. Anyone have a suggestion as to a better way to
> described Mahalo.com's 50-50 editorial/navigation service?
>
> Note: You can watch user activity on Mahalo at our User Activity
> tracker. This is the same DashBoard our staff watches.
>
> http://www.mahalo.com/Special:MahaloActivity
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