Wiki marketing and community building

Image from A Trip into Patti's World.

The website and e-newsletter Cool Cleveland focus on all aspects of Cleveland's creative class. The e-newsletter is pretty long, so I don't always go through it. However, this entry caught my eye:

CleveWiki: A collaborative effort to create a guide to the city of Cleveland.

It's a nascent effort, but interesting in what it represents and offers. It's interesting to compare sections between the big Wiki Encyclopedia and the local Cleveland site.

While I do think that contributors and editors to Wiki articles shouldn't be anonymous (cf. the recent controversy over John Sigenthaler) it's a way to structure the volunteer efforts of many, and is a continuation of what people used to call the Internet's "Gift Economy."

I think now the understanding of why people provide content "for free" on the Internet is more sophisticated. What many called the "Gift Economy" was merely an extension of the "Service" role in academia, and as Eric Raymond writes in The Cathedral and the Bazaar (later extended into a book), people benefit by contributing to and improving products although he was writing about open source software.

A Washington, DC wiki is in order, although I am not the one to lead the effort.

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