Participation inequality

From Community

In Internet culture, participation inequality reflects a theory that more people will lurk in a virtual community than will participate.

[edit] 1% Rule

The 1% Rule is a theoretical internet concept which states that people interacting with content (commenting, posting, etc) on the internet represent 1% (or less) of the people actually viewing that content

e.g. For every 1 person that posts on a forum, there are at least 99 other people viewing that forum, but not posting.

The actual percentage is likely to vary depending upon what the content is. For example; if the article or forum is solely technology based, The 1% rule becomes more of a 10 or 20% Rule.

This can be compared with the similar rules known to information science, such as the 80/20 rule known as the Pareto principle, that 20% of a group will produce 80% of the activity, however the activity may be defined. This is also known as Zipf's law.

[edit] References

• Participation Inequality: Lurkers vs. Contributors in Internet Communities by Jakob Nielsen
• "What is the 1% rule?" by Charles Arthur in The Guardian, July 20, 2006.
• "The 1% Rule" by Heather Green in BusinessWeek, May 10, 2006

This page uses content from Wikipedia. The original article was at Participation inequality. The list of authors can be seen in the page history. As with the Community Wikia, the text of Wikipedia is available under the GNU Free Documentation License.