Gil Penchina, CEO of wikia.com talks about his experiences with “Giving insane levels of control to your customers” at eBay (8 years) and now at Wikia. The difference between Wikia and Wikipedia, as Gil explains, is that WikiPedia is the encyclopedia and Wikia the rest of the library. By giving his user lots of responsibilities and freedom he found out that people are fundamentally good and will work together to make your service better. Watch the whole video for some great insights on how to ‘get more’ by ‘giving more’.
Blog hero Jason Calacanis has announced on Calacanis.com that his human-powered search engine Mahalo will embrace the Wikipedia idea of letting anyone edit any page at any time. He explains why:
Jason Calacanis and his yellow Corvette
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.
The obvious threats
I’ve happened to see the CEO of Wikia, Gil Penchina, speaking at The Next Web conference. He said that “when giving away insane levels of control is done right, it is incredibly strong“. Though he did mention the obvious dangers of welcoming everyone as an editor. Calacanis has experienced one of this threats himself:
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.
Wikipedia 3.0
So the Mahalo CEO decided to adopt a Wikipedia 3.0 model: anyone can edit the page, but experts have the final say. These experts are Mahalo editors whose full time job is to check all the changes made by Mahalo users. Yes, I said users, because in order to edit a page, you’ll have to register first. Also, Mahalo allows companies and individuals to correct the facts on their own page.
All in all, Mahalo carefully gives their users not so insane levels of control. Let’s see how this works out. If it succeeds, more companies might embrace the wisdom of crowds while checking all of their users’ moves. It simply isn’t as scary as giving your users insane levels of control.
As you might have noticed I’m writing a lot about search these days. In another post, I gave an explanation for that: people want to find similar people. Yet after a few days of reading about search and talking to search experts, I think I can broaden the reason somewhat: People are looking for two sorts of experts.
First of all, those with similar interest can be considered experts, since they know a little what you’re like and therefore can help you find the right stuff on the web. So that’s why a search engine like andUnite – that matches search terms – makes sense.
Second, we want professionals to scan whether the information we find is correct or not. Andrew Keen already warned us in his book ‘The Cult of the Amateur‘ for the damaging effects of false information – caused by the wisdom of crowds – can have. And let’s face it: the web is still really cluttered. Try finding a decent hotel with Google, I wish you all the best.
Newsweek published an excellent article about this last point this week. Jason Calacanis, founder of the human-powered search engine Mahalo – that will make finding that hotel easier with a Top 7 list – told Newsweek: “The wisdom of the crowds has peaked. Web 3.0 is taking what we’ve built in Web 2.0—the wisdom of the crowds—and putting an editorial layer on it of truly talented, compensated people to make the product more trusted and refined.” (more…)
Written on 19th June 2008
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Written on 1st June 2008
Second, we want professionals to scan whether the information we find is correct or not. Andrew Keen already warned us in his book ‘
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