Church of the Customer Blog
« Jimmy Wales gets into campaign mode | Main | The hot new replacement for Rocketboom's Amanda Congdon »
July 07, 2006
Jimmy Wales gets into campaign mode
Jimmy Wales announced on July 4, appropriately enough, that Wikimedia was launching Campaigns Wikia. In a statement of declaration, Wales says the politics wiki's purpose is to build a citizen-created site that is non-partisan and issue-specific.
He writes:
"Campaigns Wikia has the goal of bringing together people from diverse political perspectives who may not share much else, but who share the idea that they would rather see democratic politics be about engaging with the serious ideas of intelligent opponents, about activating and motivating ordinary people to get involved and really care about politics beyond the television soundbites."
If television created broadcast politics, a popular wiki could midwife participation politics, Wales theorizes. He may well be right: Evidence from Pew finds that at least 48 million Americans are web-based content creators while Technorati's Top 100 shows that at least 13 of the top 100 focus primarily on politics.
With a critical mass of people already creating content, and a sizeable interest in political blogs, that seems like a natural pathway for political hobbyists to view Campaigns Wikia as a channel for their substantive energies. How well ideologically opposed collaborators work together on it could be an extremely interesting experiment in emotionally charged group dynamics. (Attention, sociologists!) The question is: How many of the existing constituents of political blogs get involved?
If the experience of older sibling Wikipedia is any indication (see the May 3 post "The 1% Rule,"), the actual percentage of people who write or edit content for Campaigns Wikia -- as measured against the total number of visitors -- will probably be small... in the single digits. Maybe even 1 percent. There's no shame in that, and it shouldn't be a reflection of the sad participation rates in American elections (about 50% for national elections and about 30% for congressional races).
The evidence shows that Wikipedia has become a dominant force on the Internet primarily because of its relatively small but passionate band of content creators. The One Percenters are the true value creators for the other 99 percent of readers and lurkers. The citizen marketers we have talked with so far in our book research report similar statistics and don't mind a 99% lurk rate. The One Percenters say their primary goal is education, not an equal distribution of work.
Other than a mouthful of a name, Campaigns Wikia looks like it is already off to a good content creation start.
Other blogs that reference Jimmy Wales gets into campaign mode:
