*Almost Wikipedia: What Eight Collaborative Encyclopedia Projects Reveal About Mechanisms of Collective Action * http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/events/luncheon/2011/10/makohill Benjamin Mako Hill, Berkman Center & MIT Oggi alle ore 18.30 Webcast live: http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/interactive/webcast oppure: http://nexa.polito.it/berkman-webcast-live /From Benjamin Mako Hill: / I'm going to present some preliminary findings from a qualitative, inductive, case-study based analysis of 8 early projects to create online collaborative encyclopedias. It's quite likely that the only project in my dataset that you've heard of is Wikipedia. I'm am still finishing interviews but I'm hoping I can use feedback from the group to help frame the work going forward. My initial results are based on data from 8 projects -- the full population -- in the form of interviews of the projects' founders and extensive archival data. My findings are a set of propositions focused on suggesting why Wikipedia succeeded in attracting contributors while the other projects did so less effectively. In a follow-up project, I'm hoping to test these in a quantitative dataset I've been building. The project is part of a larger research project that attempts to use failure cases to understand why some attempts at online collective action are successful while most never take off.