Wikis

Wikipedia has become such an integral part of our everyday lives (or at least of mine), that it is easy to lose track of the fact that there are wikis besides it. The concept is a relatively simple one: create a way for many people to create and edit webpages in one central location. It removes the need for every user to learn HTML, and get straight to the business of creating content. There are plenty of people with expertise in a particular field who are willing to share their knowledge, but if you put the barrier of learning hand tagging in front of them, they'll just walk away. Wikis allow users to compose content in a platform reminiscent of a Word document, which is far easier and more intuitive for most of us than HTML. For a business or organization, wikis allow their documents to be organized without the rabbit warren of folders that you will often find on a company's servers. The structure of document organization becomes less opaque, making it easier for users to find the documents they are looking for.

One of the major problems of wikis is that it can be very hard to control the quality of the sites' content. A prime example of this occurred in 2006 when Stephen Colbert pointed out to viewers of The Colbert Report that they could go into Wikipedia and change articles to reflect their own idea of the truth. Fans crashed the Wikipedia servers and caused 20 articles on elephants to be locked down because people were changing those pages to say that the African elephant population had tripled in the past 6 months. He also changed the page on George Washington to say that he hadn't owned slaves, because he didn't like that unpleasant truth. This is, of course, an extreme example of the democracy of wikis getting out of hand, but it reflects the need by wikis to maintain a degree of editorial control. Users of wikis need to examine the credibility of wiki content creators before they accept the accuracy of their information. For some wikis, contributors have to be vetted before they are allowed to participate. There has to be a fine balance between how open a wiki is to participants and how reliable those participants are. This moves away from the pure democracy of the early days of wiki towards something more akin to representative democracy - a few voices speaking for the many - which is not the worst thing in the world.