Wikipedia, the encylopedia that anyone can edit, “can never work in theory, only in practice.” Accounting for one in every 200 page views on the Internet, it has become a part of our everyday lives. Wikipedia is changing the way we think about the economics of the web, the potential and the pitfalls of engaging the masses, and the role of professional information architects in a world in which content arrives from literally every direction. In this session, we’ll explore the nuts-and-bolts of how the Wikipedia project works. Who writes Wikipedia, and why? How does the English Wikipedia maintain quality, consistent tagging, and coherent organization across over two million articles? What happens when contributors disagree? We will take a tour behind the scenes at Wikipedia to learn what happens when users are encouraged to - as they say on Wikipedia… “be bold.”

1. Su-Laine Yeo Vancouver User Experience Group November, 2007 Dynamics of Wikipedia This presentation is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike 3.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

4. What is Wikipedia?

7. Size of the English Wikipedia http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Size_of_English_Wikipedia_in_August_2007.svg

13. Most viewed articles Source: http://tools.wikimedia.de/~leon/stats/wikicharts for Sept 07

14. Most viewed articles (cont’d)

15. Most viewed articles (cont’d)

20. User pages

21. Wikiscanner http://wikiscanner.virgil.gr/

22. Vandals and spammers

24. Recent Changes patrol

25. Reverting

26. User contribution history

27. Vandalism warnings http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:208.67.142.93

28. Blocks

35. What not to do

43. Talk pages

47. See also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Deleted_articles_with_freaky_titles http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Pooky_the_Teddy_Bear

57. Templates

59. Adding and using categories

63. "We can no longer feel satisfied and happy when we see these (article) numbers going up.... We should continue to turn our attention away from growth and towards quality.“ - Jimbo Wales

69. http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d4/Be_bold.pnghttp://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d4/Be_bold.png