What’s the difference between a Carpenter and a Potter? That’s roughly the difference between Mahalo and Wikipedia. Not precisely, but roughly. 
Carpenter works with tools. Potter works with hands. Carpenter cuts the wood in pieces, gives them shape by applying a lot of force, then puts these pieces in some order back again. Potter spins a wheel which is the main supplier of further force and then just sits and gives shape.
The wheel keeps spinning and the potter keeps giving shape. Carpenter exercises explicit control over the entire process while Potter exercises very subtle control. 
Building Mahalo is Carpentry where it is decided which articles to write, the format in which to write, assign people to write them, review them, put them up, keep people on job for updating them.
Building Wikipedia is Pottery where the core Wikipedia team primarily works towards keeping things in shape and maintaining some quality. Rest is all done by the spinning wheel (i.e. a movement towards building a free encyclopedia). Both are art and both have their own pluses and minuses. They both can give good results. You need to decide which approach will work for your site and then stick to that.
What’s your opinion? Do you agree with this observation?
[Guest post by Manas Garg]
I didn’t get it even after reading it three times…
Did you just make this stuff up?
Biggest flaw is that you assume the wheel to spin on its own which is the greatest challenge in building wikipedia type products..
Hi Ravi,
Was it too abstract? Anyways, I do not intend to say that the wheel spins on its own. In fact, that’s what I wrote – “Potter spins a wheel which is the main supplier of further force and then just sits and gives shape.”
Yes, I agree, spinning the wheel is the greatest challenge in building a wikipedia like product.
Actually, I am just as lost on your comment as you are on my post
Lets leave the abstractions aside… How do you think Mahalo and Wikipedia are different?
Are you trying to say this:
http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2008/12/building-an-alb.html
Hmmm. Yes and No. What Seth has tried to say through the analogy of albatross, that’s what I have tried to say through the analogy of a Potter.
Seth says albatross has to wait for the suitable external factors to fly but once it gets flying, it does on its own. However, in my opinion, Potter analogy serves us better here. Because a wikipedia (and even squidoo) kind of project doesn’t get flying because of the suitability of external factors over which it has no control. They are more like spinning the wheel. You have to spend a lot of effort initially to build a momentum around the project (something that you can influence) and then focus on giving shape to things.
Mahalo and Wikipedia have lots of differences and I have no intention to create a list of them
The theme of this post was how they collect the content. Mahalo’s effort is flat per article. Whether it is the 1st article, 100th article or 1000th article, Mahalo needs to spend roughly the similar amount of energy on that. However, for wikipedia, that’s not the case. The primary effort was in the form of building the momentum and that was a lot of effort. But once the momentum is there, the required effort gets reduced. In fact, not only the amount of effort but also the direction of effort changes. Now wikipedia team spends its energy on maintaining the quality and not on bringing the content.
How can you compare Mahalo and Wikipedia? They’re not even in the same league.
Mahalo is very ingenious but trite! Dependent on small top down editorial team and volunteers that tries to create SEO-tuned pages that incidentally are useful. Its met with success because of the PR/SEM smarts of its founder but its unlikely to be around in a few years.
Wikipedia is so much more useful. Wikipedia seems to be a novel movement by the people for the people — a sort of continuation of Linux/Open Software in a broader domain — that has pretty much captured 90% of all archival ‘first order’ knowledge, and probably the most glowing example of nameless people from all over the world getting together to do something good and useful..
@Manas Garg – you are right. One must know the kind of business one is trying to build.
Good thought and analogy!
What can be Knol and wikia search compared to?
@Rakesh I just want to offer a perspective of what various content generation techniques are and how we could get some insight into them by drawing parallels from elsewhere. Wikipedia is a movement, Mahalo is a business and that’s fine. What will stay and what won’t cannot be said at this juncture. Survivability is about adaptability and not about current success or sentiments. I do plan to cover Wikipedia in much more depth gradually over multiple posts. We’ll get to discuss about its success in detail
By the way, I am not against Wikipedia. I am also one of those nameless people who have made contributions to Wikipedia and I still do. In the process, I have learnt several things about it.
@Ravi – My intention is not to look at it from business angle. It’s just content generation, the goals could be altruistic or business-like.
@Sumeet – For Wikia, Jimmy Wales is trying to replicate the social system of Wikipedia i.e. Pottery. Whether he executes it in exactly the same way or not is to be seen. For Knol, I am at a loss in finding a parallel
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