Creating a high traffic social wiki is very easy. The guideline of the website has to allow that the users are allowed to post URL to external websites and they will do very often. Putting a backlink to a wiki is a desired behavior and can be done on mass scale. The result is, that the wiki will gets more users and more server-request than the admin is interested in. Even if all the requests are buffered in a review queue the website will become out of control very fast.
The problem of social networks is, that creating a posting which contains only of a URL plus a sentence is a cheap operation, while deleting all the spam and revisiting the source of the URL is a demanding task. As a result the crowd of 1000 and more users can bring down the project easily without breaking the formal rules of the wiki.
The only answer to this problem is, if the wiki admins defines the rules differently. That means he postulates that positing external URLs is forbidden and messages who are doing so are spam. This simple rule will reduce the traffic very much and makes the attractive lower of the website.
The question is, if external URLs are forbidden what remains wished content? Internal URL are the next possible text-snippet. And internal URL is sometimes called internal link and is referencing to content allready stored in the wiki. Creating such a link is also a cheap task. Not so cheap like an external link but it is more easier than posting fresh content.
Internal wiki links are balanced, which means that the overall traffic in the system will remains slow but at the same time the user have a little bit fun. Before it makes sense to post an internal link the target has to be created in the wiki. This task is a demanding one. Everybody knows that writing a 20kb wiki article doesn't make lots of fun. As a result the amount of people who are doing is small.
On the other hand the ability to set an wiki link to the added content can become a motivation. Let us observe internal links by it's own. Suppose there is an AI Wiki available which contains of around 100 articles written in the past. So it is basically some kind of smaller encyclopedia or knowledgebase. Like all the wiki projects in the internet such an AI wiki has the main problem to increase it's traffic. The topic sounds not very interesting and the total number of contributers is low. Allowing to set wiki-links to the 100 articles helps to improve to make the wiki project more social.
Who can this be realized in reality? Apart from the content section, the wiki will need a social section. The social section is equal to a single general group in which discussion is allowed over the entire wiki. In this group the users can post internal URL as much as they can. An example log of the social section contains of:
2019-03-02 [URL] nice edit from user1, thx
2019-03-03 [URL]
2019-03-05 [URL] this doesn't fits our quality standard.
2019-03-06 [URL] funny picture.
2019-03-09 [URL]
and so on. What this group decision looks like is a social network. It is a forum inside the wiki in which internal URL are posted. The aim is not to add new content and increase the overall article count, but to talk to the users and evaluate their content. This social section in the wiki could be improved drastically if also external URLs are allowed which means to websites somewhere in the internet, to videos hosted on different servers and to blogs. But similar to what I've mentioned in the introduction the ability to post external URL would make the Wiki too attractive. So the idea is to reduce a bit the functionality for reason of easier moderation.
The prediction is, that the reader and authors of the wiki will love the social section and the traffic on this single page will become the highest in the overall wiki. And it helps to answer why somebody should contribute to the wiki, because if he uploads a new wiki article, he gets a comment in the social section which is some kind group oriented peer review.
From a technical perspective it is easy for the wiki admin to force the entire wiki to not posting external URL. All what is needed is a textual description of this rule on the startpage plus a motivated admin who deletes all the postings which are not following this rule. Detecting a post which contains an external URL is an easy to script problem. The filter has to search for a string which starts with https:// and then the post gets flagged. That means, it is possible delete all external URL posts.
One question remains open so far. Why is page in a wiki which contains only of internal links desired content? Why are the people posting such links and why are they reading posts from other? Because this helps them to track the group. A wiki which contains only of 100 articles about Artificial intelligence looks a bit too serious. Even if the content is written well and is enriched with images there is missing something. The reason why somebody should read the content and why somebody else should post new content. This motivation is not given by the 100 articles but is created in the social section of the wiki. People likes to interact with people, not with the mediawiki engine. They love a situation in which their newly added article is referenced by other. And they hate it, if other people laugh about their writing skills.
From a technical point of view a social section in a wiki contains of “[link] text”. In the literature this is called an annotated peer review. It is referencing to nformation which is already available and put them into a higher context. If other users has the ability to react to such a curated link a nice interactive communication is the result.
BOTS
BOTS
The term curated link can be understood as a handmade playlist. In the social section of the wiki the people are not in the author mode, but in the discjockey mode. That means, they are talking to the mass and showing them content:
“Did you have seen [URL]?”
“Nope, but [URL] is better than any other page”.
This kind of interaction is equal to socialize a wiki. It is a trick to make the wiki more attractive, it will make the content in the wiki more interesting. The social section of a wiki can be improved further if well known techniques from mainstream social networks are used. I'm speaking about autoposting tool. That is a computer program who can post new messages to the message board. The bot is using a CSV table with URLs. Such a bot can be installed by the admin of the wiki, but also normal users can program a bot with AutoIt. Let me give an example. A wiki is there which contains of 100 articles about AI. No user apart from the admin has an account in the wiki. The bot posts the following announcement in the social section of the AI Wiki.
2019-03-01 [URL]
2019-03-02 [URL]
2019-03-03 [URL]
2019-03-04 [URL]
2019-03-05 [URL]
2019-03-06 [URL]
2019-03-07 [URL]
That means it's behavior is strongly predictable. Each day the bot posts a internal link which is referencing to the wiki. Somebody may ask what the purpose is. The idea is to produce a traffic noise which is the backbone of a social network. Even if no human writes a comment, the normal traffic is already there. It shows to a stranger that the comment section is working and that it's ok to post an interwiki link.
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