Mahalo Pages Now Open for Public Editing
June 1st, 2008By: Sean Percival
As I blogged about last week, Mahalo guide notes are now open for public editing. The guide notes are the small write ups for each topic that appear along the right hand side of the page. Lately we’ve expanded over 15,000 of our pages to include more content (200-500 worlds) and additional subsections. The result is very much a Google/Wikipedia mashup with only the best and most relevant content showcased.
Jason blogged about this earlier today toting it as Wikipedia 3.0. He points out that you can even edit your own (or your companies page) as well. This can be a beyond frustrating experience on Wikipedia as I’m sure many of you already know.
Ryan Spoon also had a few thoughts on accountability and transparency. Both are something we discuss heavily when thinking about the future of Mahalo.
To get started simply login and look for the link in the bottom of any guide note as seen to the right. To insure quality updates every change will be monitored by our staff. The hope is we can add that all important layer of public participation without sacrificing quality and of course accuracy.
We have also made our internal activity page public. Here you can see everything coming into Mahalo and how it was handled.
Please let me know your thoughts and feedback on this in the comments.
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June 1st, 2008 at 4:25 am
Looks like you guys not only opened the flood gates, you jumped in to the water flow
I am worried (on your behalf), that once the wikipedia crowd comes over, won’t it be hard to keep up with Jason’s #2 “Our staff is going to check every edit made and confirm it is correct. We have three full-time folks on this right now and our expectation is we will only get 10-50 editors per day”
You guys probably talked and debated about this a lot… but that is a lot of time/effort and money.
I know you have level 3 and 4 people working there and they will work though it;however, 10-50 may be a little low. Especially with Jason’s vision. I predict you will 2 to 3 times that.
Or… am I completely missing the whole point?
June 1st, 2008 at 4:56 am
Hey Larry, as always thanks for your feedback. I’m also thinking (and hoping) we get to 100-250 edits per day pretty quickly. We have a big focus on the quality of content right now, moving resources over to this is part of that.
There is also the possibility members of the public to get involved with the reviewing process later on. These would be people with a good eye and attention to detail/facts. They should be authorities in the topics they cover as well. This is something we have to really think about to avoid the bands of anonymous editors that rule over wikipedia.