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Ask HN: Models for Collaborative Websites?

3 points by tduberne ↗ HN
I am playing with the idea of creating a niche information website, where I want users to be able to contribute and improve the content.

I am looking at the Wikipedia and StackOverflow models to get inspiration on how to foster quality contributions. Is there any other good example of a website where good quality content emerges from user contributions?

Using a pure Wiki or Stack-exchange model is not an option, because:

- I want to be able to impose a schema for the different items that can be documented, to improve searchability, so a wiki is a bit too unstructured, but

- the general structure should be closer to an encyclopedia than a Q&A

The aim is to provide a collection of quality information, which is missing in that niche, not to make money, in case that matters.

3 comments

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brudgers
I want to be able to impose a schema

The alternative is document search. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Document_retrieval It's how Wikipedia, StackOverflow (and Google) provide reasonable search capabilities. Requiring normalized data is likely to reduce user participation. Good luck.

amsha
The structure of your website's data is less important than its moderation process. High quality online communities tend to have strong, well-defined moderation policies – Wikipedia and Stack Overflow are good examples, as are HN and certain subreddits (eg AskHistorians).

Regardless of the technology behind a website, online communities without strong moderation tend to die over time as low quality content crowds out everything else.

tduberne
Thank you for the remark. That is indeed also what I am looking at, or more precisely the interaction between structure and moderation policy. Stackoverflow is a very good example of how they interact. At such an early stage, I am mostly trying to identify structures on which policies can be built, as policies are much easier to change.