(CC) photo by Joi Ito

Yester­day I wore two hats as a guest and co-host on David Mathison’s Be the Media Radio pod­cast on BlogTalkRa­dio along with Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales. The topic was online com­mu­ni­ties — how to grow, nur­ture and sus­tain them,

Here’s our hour­long con­ver­sa­tion — Jimmy Wales comes in about 20 min­utes into it:

It was a wide-ranging con­ver­sa­tion about the democ­ra­ti­za­tion of media, the birth of Our­me­dia and YouTube, the thriv­ing global open source devel­op­ment com­mu­nity of Word­Press, Cre­ative Com­mons licenses, Ning, entre­pre­neur­ial jour­nal­ism, Sil­i­con Valley’s mantra of embrac­ing fail­ure, and the state of Wikipedia. (Dis­clo­sure: I’m men­tioned in a cou­ple of chap­ters of Mathison’s book, Be the Media.)

I con­veyed to Wales an obser­va­tion by author and friend Howard Rhein­gold, who lit­er­ally wrote book on vir­tual com­mu­ni­ties: All online com­mu­ni­ties have life cycles, he said. When they mature, it becomes more dif­fi­cult to main­tain a fresh flow of new­com­ers. Mature online com­mu­ni­ties can con­tinue for years, but there is a dan­ger of stag­na­tion that accom­pa­nies longevity. Howard has tried a num­ber of dif­fer­ent approaches with his own com­mu­ni­ties, pro­vid­ing a “fresh space” for newcomers.

Wales said it was a thought­ful point and an ongo­ing chal­lenge for Wikipedia, which is now com­ing up with inno­v­a­tive ways to keep peo­ple engaged, par­tic­u­larly mak­ing the edit­ing expe­ri­ence more intu­itive for nongeeks. (Even for a geek like me, fig­ur­ing out how to do some­thing as sim­ple as adding a foot­note remains obdu­rately difficult.)

Pro­fes­sor Bill Dens­more of Medi­a­Gi­raffe called in and asked about the Wall Street Jour­nal story about how Wikipedia’s growth has stag­nated. Wales chuck­led and said, “Sev­eral of us joked that we couldn’t find the edit but­ton on the Journal’s story.” He called the account “com­pletely false” and that more than 380 mil­lion peo­ple in Jan­u­ary used Wikipedia. We didn’t get to talk about his for-profit ven­ture, Wikia, which has turned a profit and seems to also be doing remark­ably well.

David Meer­man Scott and Craig New­mark are among future guests on the Be the Media hour.

Related

• 6 ques­tions for the author of ‘Be the Media’ (Socialmedia.biz)

• Google Gives $2 Mil­lion to Wikipedia (blogs.wsj.com)

JD Lasica works with major com­pa­nies and non­prof­its on social media strate­gies. See his busi­ness pro­file, con­tact JD or leave a comment.