OpEd: FFXIclopedia Hits a New Benchmark
Wikia - creating communities
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FFXIclopedia hit 20,000 articles this past month. That's a long way from where we started. Granted it took a while to get there - about three years. Since FFXIclopedia is based on an MMORPG, article count was never going to be a problem. As an MMORPG, the producer of the game is constantly creating new content, so from an article standpoint, we will continue to grow as the game grows. So while FFXIclopedia is proud about hitting this benchmark, I think (hope) we are collectively more proud about the content and quality of the information. It is this fact – and this fact alone – that allowed us to attract 100,000 visits and 1 million pageviews per day.[1]
Content is king they say. That’s certainly true. But article content, from a gaming perspective, is easy. The game dictates what you need. Jobs, items, spells, quests, places, etc. Behind most games are these or similar concepts. And each of these will typically need an article. Sure, to get started we had to get that content into the FFXIclopedia. That can take time, but maybe less than you think. In about three months we were able to add about 5,000 articles back in early-mid 2005. These were largely cut-and-paste articles identifying all of those jobs, items, spells, quests, places. That growth continued but by that point we at least had the basic information there for people to take a look at. Making the content look its best came later.
To grow and become a resource, we needed to organize the information and manage the volume of articles that were flooding the wiki. We went through a lot of changes back then. Categories were liked, then disliked, then liked again. Same with subpages. We learned how to use templates and, eventually, the some more advanced techniques. Organization of information has to be a priority for any source of information, and that is especially true when the information is coming from multiple, independent sources.
What I’ve learned from this experience is that it all takes some brute force (i.e. initial content) to get it started, some finesse to get it all usable (i.e. organization and beautification), and then some luck. Luck in the form of that first wave of users. Call them early adopters, pioneers, connectors, whatever. But wiki communities, where people can come together to edit and create collectively, require, among other things, a big push from people to start the ball rolling. For those interested, take a look at what Malcolm Gladwell writes about this (or at least, in my view, similar) concept:
The Tipping Point is the biography of an idea, and the idea is very simple. It is the best way to understand the emergence of fashion trends, the ebb and flow of crime waves, or for that matter, the transformation of unknown books into bestsellers, or the rise of teenage smoking, of the phenomena of word of mouth, or any number of the other mysterious changes that mark everyday life is to think of them as epidemics. Ideas and messages and behaviors spread just like viruses do.[2]
I would urge those interested to to read this book - it is a fascinating look at how things interact and how little changes can cause large reactions (it is not a dificult or technical read).
Anyway, I digress. 20,000 articles is a nice mark to hit for sure.[3] I have no doubt that we’ll hit 25,000 soon enough (we’re closing in on 21,000 already). But that’s not the endgame. Alone that’s not what makes a wiki good, usable, user-friendly, attractive, and ultimately valuable to the larger community. That comes with time and refinement. And ultimately a community who bands together in order to make that wiki the best resource it can be.
--GAHOO t/ c 23:38, 18 December 2007 (UTC)
