On this Week’s Readings

This week’s readings were very interesting. I thought that both the Lost Museum and the Historic Tale Construction Kit were great examples of how historians can use digital technology to enhance the story they are trying to tell, and make history fun and accessible to users. Unfortunately, there is no chance I could replicate that type of website on my own. First of all, I don’t have the technical skill or know-how to even attempt to build a site like that. Secondly, those sites both rely heavily on Flash and JavaScript, both of which are big no-no’s in this class.

Therefore, I wanted to focus on Jakob Nielsen’s article on Participation Inequality. In the article, Nielsen confirmed what I have long suspected: the overwhelming majority of web users don’t actively participate/contribute to the sites they visit, they simply “lurk” in the background. I have suspected this because I am a “lurker” myself. I have a few websites that I visit multiple times a day, every single day. Several of these are blogs, however, not once have I chosen to comment. Personally, I have just never felt the need to share my thoughts/feelings on a particular topic with a community of anonymous strangers (even though most of those strangers have the same interests as me). I do however, read the comments sections of various blogs from time to time, and have noticed that a handful of users pop up time and time again. These are the people who Nielson calls “heavy contributors.” Only about 1% of internet users fall into this category.

As Nielsen notes, this participation inequality is problematic for various reasons. For one, it gives people a “biased understanding of the [site's] community, because many differences almost certainly exist between people who post a lot and those who post a little. And you would never hear from the silent majority of lurkers.” It is also problematic on site’s like Wikipedia, which rely almost entirely on user contributions. According to Nielsen, only about 0.2% of Wikipedia’s users are active contributers, and more significantly, the site’s “most active 1,000 people — 0.003% of its users — contribute about two-thirds of the site’s edits.” This means that a very small minority of the site’s users are controlling the vast majority of the site’s content. I’m sure that most of these people are very good at what they do and have the best intentions for the site in mind. Yet assuredly, some of them have particular biases and agendas that color the edits they make and the content they produce. Wikipedia really does tend to do a good job of self-policing its articles, so I’m not arguing that there are glaring problems in all their articles, but I do think it is problematic to know that so few people are responsible for the content of the site, when so many people rely on that site for information.

Unfortunately, Nielsen does not offer much hope for site creators who hope to encourage broader user participation. Indeed, he flatly states that “you can’t” overcome participation inequality. He does give a few suggestions, but his research indicates that trying to radically equalize the “90-9-1″ rule is a quixotic quest. I think that this article is an important one for people in class to keep in mind if they are considering creating a web site that relies heavily on user participation. However, in a history site, I would think most of the users that visit the site have specific interest in that historical topic, whether they are students, professors, or passionate amateurs. Therefore, I think its reasonable to assume that a higher percentage of users would participate/contribute to the site, especially if the site makes it clear that they need contributions to survive. Perhaps that assumption is wrong (Nielsen doesn’t provide any data on history websites), but I think that classmates who want to design sites that rely on user contributions should not lose hope after reading this article.