Adventures in Wiki

Last December 4, I woke up suddenly at 6am in my hotel room in Los Angeles with a really great idea for a wiki. A really fantastically great idea. I wouldn’t say that I was positive it would make me billions, but I figured the odds were at least fifty percent.

I should point out that I’m a magazine writer, not a computer person, and I hadn’t programmed a computer since high school, in the days when the most sophisticated way to store data was on a tape recorder. However, my idea seemed so self-evidently genius that the only worry nagging me was that someone had already thought of it.

This was the idea: we needed to make a Wikipedia for non-famous people. See, Wikipedia, as you probably know, has entries for just about everything, but it doesn’t allow you to create a page about a person who isn’t famous (i.e., has been written about in the press). All the time people are putting up pages about themselves and their friends and having them get taken down by the scouring bands of volunteer editors who patrol the backstage areas of Wikipedia, keeping everything shipshape.

There’s a good reason for this, by the way. If nothing has been written about a person in the media, there’s no way to verify what’s on their Wikipedia page. So you open up problems with libel, hoaxing, and all sorts of other bad things. That’s not what I was thinking about, though. I was thinking about all that pent up demand. All these people who are getting kicked off Wikipedia need someplace to go. I’ll give them a place. And then it will expand. Because, really, we all need to have some kind of presence in the alternate electronic universe — some way to make sure that, if a stranger Googles us, they’ll find something.

When I’d give people my spiel the person to whom I was spieling would often say, “Oh, you’re talking about Facebook.” And I would say, “No, because your Facebook profile can only be seen by your friends. Plus it’s all gimmicked up with annoying bells and whistles and greasy kids’ stuff. I think we all need to have a sober, informative presence on the web where people can go and find out more info about you. Like the phone book, but with more stuff.” (If you want to read more such justification, you can go to the main page of the site I eventually built, www.wikipopuli.com).

Long and short, I shelled out for a domain name, bought a web-hosting plan, taught myself how to build a wiki. God bless their souls, the Wikimedia people have done a great job of making the tools free and easy to use. And I was kind of obsessed. By mid-December I had a bare bones version of the site up and running. I made pages for my wife and my friends, and when I went home to Florida for Christmas I made pages for my family.

By this time I was beginning to get a freshman-level understanding of wikis, their history, and what makes them tick. And the gist is, what really makes a wiki work is something that the vast majority of users never sees: namely, those aforementioned volunteer editors. They create all the content and keep it from getting ruined by spammers, crazy people, trolls and havoc-wreakers. By some miracle, Wikipedia happened to attract tens of thousands of them, many of whom have practically no other life apart from making Wikipedia better. If my wiki was going to succeed, I’d have to get a core of volunteers engaged in it.

So this was my plan: I’d spend, say, an hour every day going into the part of the backstage area of Wikipedia where the communities of editors argue about whether so-and-so should be kicked off for not being famous enough. And I’d add a note to the person who was about to be executed: ‘Hey, there’s this great other site, why don’t you come over.” And maybe ten percent of the time, or five, they would, and maybe play around a little bit, maybe make an entry or two.

Then came the day that a Wikipopuli administrator – namely, someone who has been granted unusual powers in return for their selfless dedication to the cause – sent me a note saying that he’d noticed what I was doing, and if I kept doing it, he’d have me banned forever. Because people are supposed to spend their time on Wikipedia making Wikipedia better, not pimping their other sites. So I stopped doing that. And gradually my traffic, never that big to start with, gradually dried up.

 Anything viral, from actual viruses to rumors to funny emails that get sent around, have to follow a simple mathematics: each person who picks it up has to pass it along to at least, on average, more than one other person. As it happened, at Wikipopuli a few people who were introduced to the idea liked it and made pages for themselves, but it wasn’t enough, and the idea didn’t catch on.

The fundamental problem was structural. With Wikipedia, people can, and do, make pages about everything under the sun that interests them. When the subject is limited to people, you’re pretty much limited to writing about yourself, maybe your spouse, your closest friends – there’s a limit to how much you can throw yourself into the cause.

 So gradually the site quieted down to its current state, which is more or less moribund. I don’t regret the effort I put into it. The fact is, there’s no way to predict whether a site like a wiki will succeed or not until you try. No one could ever have foreseen that Wikipedia would achieve the success it has, because no one had ever set up a platform that would induce a hoard of pseudonymous, geographically scattered volunteers to spontaneously self-assemble into a vigorous, self-policing hive. Miraculously, it worked. Amazing. So that’s how you forge ahead: you throw your idea against the wall and see if it sticks. Once in a while — hi, Mark Zuckerberg! — you come out a billionaire.