Citizendium Blog

The Write-a-Thon was regarded as great fun and a success by its participants and ever since I’ve been wanting to blog about the meaning of it.

It worked for a couple of reasons.  First, there was a shared understanding, which solved a coordination problem (or created a coordination opportunity?):

1. Large numbers of people were made aware of “an event” going on on the wiki, explicitly labelled as a relatively rare (monthly) event.
2. The globality of the event was emphasized, if only by necessity (the Write-a-Thon lasted from July 31, 1200 UTC, in New Zealand, until August 2, 1000 UTC, in Hawaii).
3. They knew, also, that large numbers of other people, from around the globe, knew these things; so there was a shared understanding.
4. Given this shared understanding, they could reasonably infer that other people would actually show up.
5. That gave some people a reason to show up themselves, a reason that they did not have at other times: an expectation of more participants on the wiki.
6. So they showed up!

Second, we lowered the cost of participation.  We encouraged people to write short articles (”stubs”), as long as they weren’t too short, with the expectation that others, who were specifically asked to add to other people’s work, would help expand those new articles.

Third, we also made participation attractive by asking participants to work on each other’s stuff.  There was a “party” atmosphere going on, in no small part because you could call yourself a “Partier” only if you actually edited someone else’s new article (i.e., created during the Write-a-Thon).  Again, this was part of the shared understanding of the participants.

Fourth, we actually distinguished between these “Partiers” and people who only partly participated–either by only creating a new article (these were the “porch sitters”), or by only editing someone else’s article (the “party crashers”)–and then, people could acknowledge that they didn’t participate (the “total party poops”).

The success of the Write-a-Thon is actually small-scale illustration of how and why strong collaboration in general works.