The wiki thing is emperor’s new clothes of modern computing. Everyone pays lip service to it, yet most people who really tried will tell you it just didn’t work out for them. The lure of the wiki principle is about the promise of writable web.
When someone comes to me these days and says “we have to have a wiki,” what I really hear is “I would like to communicate via web pages in a way as simple as writing an email.” I believe that is what people really see behind the wiki principle: it’s been almost 20 years that the web is read-only, and it is about time that we fix that failed experiment. The principle we call wiki comes down to only one thing: ability to create and edit our own content without knowing HTML or using forms.
But this wiki thing doesn’t work as the geeky hype peddlers would want you to believe. It might work for a few geeks (all computer things work for geeks, they created them to their own image). It might indeed be the simplest thing that could possibly work… if you’re a nerd.
In reality, how many people want someone else to edit their writing just like that? There’s a reason comments are separate from blog posts – if the wiki concept really flew, than we would all be using it for blogging, letting everyone intervene in our thoughts and sentences. If you write anything meaningful, then sentences have to have certain flow and structure to it; you have to own your own words. Other people’s input should not change the integrity of your thinking. One can consider someone’s comments and integrate them into text, but it has to be the author deciding whether to apply changes or not, and the reader should have the right to compare author’s thoughts against the comment. The wiki principle goes against this, and that is why it fails us.
Wikipedia’s name brought us this hype. Yet Wikipedia is about the hierarchical editorial organization, not about the wiki itself. Unfortunately, there are a lot of people believing in technology as a cure: if only we had a wiki, we’d be producing great content just like Wikipedia, the argument goes. Rrrright… how about having great content first?
What ticks me off is sometimes I talk to supposedly responsible and important IT people about collaborative authoring. And invariably they ask “what is that?“, and I say “you know wikipedia, the principle?“, and then invariably I hear “Oh, so you want to put up a wiki?” 
As with all things web, there’s a ton of hype around it. People talk, but not many really understand what it is really about. So, these days everyone and his neighbor wants a wiki. When someone suggests to you “let’s have a wiki!,” just ask “why?”
Usually you won’t get a meaningful answer, for the emperor has no clothes.
I’ve seen wiki’s work really well on Intranets and in other closed, and trusting, communities. Granted these have tended to be communities of geeks, but then mathematics is mostly only useful to mathematicians.
What is really painful in large organisations is the agony of getting something onto the WWW and the further agony of getting it removed/corrected when it’s wrong, obsolete, etc. Wikis might not be the best tool for this, but they are probably seen as better than being beaten to death by procedures and policies.
Many organisations place extreme political barriers between their innovators and their customers. In the absense of working political solutions to this political problem I expect more and more will turn to technical fixes such as wikis.
Michael, agreed: getting things up on the public web site is indeed an agony. That’s why I gave up on having a web site.
Unfortunately, I don’t share your optimism. The “wiki” hype paints the wrong picture for a non-IT decision maker. The “anyone can edit” feature scares the living daylights out of the management.
I believe the solution will be more akin to blogs – there’s much more structure to it.
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So it seems that Wikipedia went through a very unstructured phase, resulting in some individuals panicking about spam, which led to them trying to impose too much structure. As ever, the complexity sweetspot is required – the point where there is enough structure for cohesive evolution, neither confused by chaos nor stifled by order.
What have Wikipedia learned in the last 6 months about finding the balance? How can this be applied elsewhere? Or are blogs the only answer?
I daresay wikis about science or mathematics cover less debatable or politically motivated subject matter than more opinion-rich humanities subjects… A case of horses for courses?
I’d say that all the Wikipedia hoopla with editors and policing comes down to more or less preserving the integrity of content to conform to the point of view of one single person (the moderator) .
Instead of one single (N)POV, maybe they should have gone for parallel versions allowing forking of content and multiple points of view.
As you say, more structured areas like mathematics all subscribe to much more coherent views on most subjects – if we were to examine those wikis, would we find that most pages are written by a single author?
Wiki Wiki Wiki (just like that cheezy song by Newcleus goes), seriously I’ve been thinking about creating a Wiki Wiki Wiki Sucks mix. Setting aside the musical humor, Wiki really in my opinion sucks. It’s been creeping into project management software, collaboration software and place that well.. it just should not be.
Set aside the authorship/ownership of content and who gets to over write whom, it requires it’s own form of Geeky short codes to work with text. Not very user friendly for the average person to use and understand.
Recently, I was looking around at solutions to manage all the thoughts, ideas and notes I have stuffed in various folders on my own PC. I tried a number of half baked Geeky solutions. Personal WikiPads about drove me out of my mind. First trying to learn all the short codes, and second in regards to how to organize things in a manner that made common sense. A number of Geeks swear by Wiki, I’m not one of them. Needless to say after hours of trying all kinds of software out, I was entinced by a few blogs to download and give MS Office OneNote out. Ahhhh… freedom and peace of mind at last. It’s organized just like real Note Books are, with tabs and pages and it supports tagging items, all kids of different kinds of tags. Look Mom, I did’t have to learn a foreign technogeek wiki text programming language either. What’s sad, is that I’m a programming Geek too. I can Kung Foo my way around SQL databases and OOP programing, but with Wiki I just wanted to beat myself and the Wiki Creators over the head with my keyboard. Managing information should be easy, not difficult.
I think Blog like comments to content is 100% dead right. Let the author make revisions to the content, since the author is the responsible person. In terms of Multiple people working on the same Documents, something like a controlled versioning system is better. Just apply Document management principles into the content management. This Wiki Wiki Wiki business just does not live up to the expectations of being something practicle and easy to use.