Factors That Make Online Collaborative Projects Successful: The Wikipedia Experience

Wikipedia, the Web-based, free-content encyclopedia, which is written collaboratively by volunteers, has been, and continues to be, a phenomenal success. Founded in January 2001, today, it is one of the most popular reference sites on the Web, receiving around 50 million hits a day and contains approximately 1.5 million articles. There are now 195 independent language editions, all sponsored by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation.

As with any major, long-term collaborative project, though, the road to success was arduous, fraught with political in-fighting, conflicts of interest and multiple attempts at self-sabotage.

In a fascinating, albeit extremely long-winded, account of this journey, published in two articles on Slashdot (first and second), Larry Sanger, former Wikipedia editor-in-chief, shares his views on how today's success was achieved. The lessons learned provide some interesting insights into how any open-access, multi-contributor, collaboration-based publishing project can succeed. (Via Robin Good)