Crowdsourcing/Community design

Wikipedia is a social innovation, not a technological innovation. It is a human dialogue and conversation.
—Jimmy Wales quoted in Get There Early: Sensing the Future to Compete in the Present Bob Johansen (2007)

Wiki software is used by many different sites for different purposes, not all of which become successful crowdsourcing projects. The site has to function as a community that makes positive contributors feel welcome and destructive contributors unwelcome. It has to encourage people with different interests and opinions to build on each other’s work. The direction taken with this design can make or break the success of the project.