Comments on: Why Wiki Sucks

By: Damir Simunic

Damir Simunic — Sun, 29 Jun 2008 14:15:23 +0000

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?

By: Mark Hurst

Mark Hurst — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 14:32:59 +0000

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?

By: Why Wysiwyg Sucks « Edge for Dev

Why Wysiwyg Sucks « Edge for Dev — Wed, 21 May 2008 22:36:20 +0000

[...] · No Comments Of all the posts I wrote over the past six months, the second most popular is Why Wiki Sucks – funny, all visits to that post are always from search engine searches for “wiki [...]

By: Damir Simunic

Damir Simunic — Sun, 14 Oct 2007 18:46:11 +0000

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.

By: Michael Saunby

Michael Saunby — Sun, 14 Oct 2007 11:59:31 +0000

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.