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One of the many excellent sessions in the ScreenBurn track at SXSW Interactive this year, the "How Gamers Are Adopting the Wiki Way" panel featured George Pribul (lead admin of WoWWiki.com), April "CuppaJo" Burba (Community Manager for Tabula Rasa), Angelique Shelton (GM of Wikia Gaming at Wikia Inc), and Jake McKee (Principal at Ant's Eye View) talking about the symbiotic relationship between gamers and wikis. Interesting factoid: WoWWiki is now the second largest English-language wiki in the world behind Wikipedia. At 3 million unique users per month, a full half of English-speaking WoW players visit WoWWiki every month.

One of the initial questions was the obvious, "Why wikis?" Pribul answered that forums, the traditional places where gamer communities gather, aren't very good formats for organizing information. Wikis not only organize information very well but allow community collaboration on data that changes over time. A question from the audience next asked about the significance of wikis for other industries besides gaming. Shelton responded, "Whatever people have a natural passion about, and any way you can enable your customers to come together and collaborate on their passion -- wikis are an amazing tool for that. Individuals can step up and take ownership of something." She mentioned that people often wonder why anyone would want to write content for free, and used a basketball analogy to counter that: even though you could get paid to do it in the NBA, people still play pickup games on the street. The social dynamics within a wiki give participants pride, attribution, and community elevation -- people get social status for sharing this information.

Gallery: SXSW 2008

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