Monday, March 26, 2007

dr.dk/sportswiki This sports wiki is a collaboration between the Danish Broadcasting Corporation and the volunteers behind the Danish Wikipedia.

Earlier, Tidbits editor Amy Gahran asked for wiki-related ideas for news organizations. So here I'm doing what I normally wouldn't: write about a project I'm personally involved in. My excuse: Amy asked me to write a piece about it.

Last year around the time of the World Cup and Tour de France, The Danish Broadcasting Corporation (DR) decided to launch a sports wiki.

We already had a sports encyclopedia which our sports desk published around the time of the 2004 Olympics in Athens. This excellent sub-site contained loads of articles and video about previous Olympics, sports stars, etc. Of course, the problem was that updating encyclopedias is an everlasting and therefore very costly project.

Instead of updating the initial project with improved sections on soccer and cycling we decided to approach the people behind the Danish Wikipedia and suggest a wiki encyclopedia based on their content. To start, we re-edited and copied a bundle of articles from our Olympic encyclopedia onto the Danish Wikipedia site. (Yes, we gave them away.)

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The largest challenge was probably bridging two very different cultures. The Danish Broadcasting Corporation is a fairly large organization with 3500 employees, two national TV-channels, three national radio stations, 11 local radio stations, a large Web site -- plus a handful of orchestras. In comparison, the Danish Wikipedia group has no formal organization and no one is being paid for their work. They discuss matters on a chat list, and this is where you hang out late at night if you want something approved.

Fortunately the Wikipedia group liked our idea and they were extremely helpful and constructive. Together we considered various technical solutions and decided on model with a cookie-based skin, which presented Danish Wikipedia content in a combined DR/Wikipedia design. Article editing happens directly in the Wikipedia database. This has kept the cost of the entire project to around $4000 USD which was spent mainly on design and implementation.

Here's the result.

(Presently there's a small mistake in the cookie session. Usually you should be able to keep the SportsWiki "skin" for both reading and editing the various articles. I hope we can fix this soon).

The cooperation between DR and Wikipedia was a first -- not only to us -- but also to Wikipedia. Therefore I'd estimate that 80 percent of our time and resources were spent on explaining the idea to people in the two organizations. The rest was divided between design and technical implementation.

We cannot measure how many users read articles, but in the two months after the launch there were six to eight sports-related articles among the 20 most edited articles on the Danish Wikipedia. Also a handful of sports articles became "article-of-the-week."

Encyclopedias will never be traffic magnets (unless you're the world's largest encyclopedia), so my advice is to only launch wiki projects intended to present users with great content, and to engage in teamwork with your audience.

Maybe this is the most important point: Measure success not in page views or unique users, but in the number of participating users.

Please comment below or if you have any questions.

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