such a dork!

Wiki Wacky

Wikis* seem to be the preferred 'Net experiment these days. The most recent colossal failure belongs to the British.

The British Secretary of State for the Department for Environment, Food, and Rural Affairs decided to try a wiki to encourage discussion about environmental issues. After a couple of weeks, it was crushed under the weight of vandalism. The L.A. Times achieved a similar result last year, when they made a wiki of an article about the Iraq war. Wikipedia itself has come under fire several times — most famously for a malicious edit in the biography of John Seigenthaler — and its owners have been frequently forced to implement new ways to keep the wolves at bay.

Wired Online, though, managed to pull off a more or less successful experiment with an article about — appropriately enough — wikis. And there has been at least one study published in Nature defending Wikipedia's accuracy and placing it on par with the Encyclopedia Britannica.

So they can work, if you can hit the very narrow channel between finding enough people to make use of the collective intelligence and avoiding attracting the attention of the terminally bored.

Or...

Did the DERFA and L.A. Times wikis actually fail? They didn't accomplish precisely what the creators intended, that's for sure. But if the vandals outweigh the legitimate contributors, is that failure or a commentary on the subject matter? Or presentation? Or implementation?

* A quick explanation: Wikis are websites that can be edited by the public. The idea is that the collective intelligence of the audience will outweigh, or at least provide a useful couterpoint to, the intelligence of one or two designated experts. Consensus is achieved through the interplay of conflicting viewpoints, and inaccuracy is weeded out by an army of invested editors.

posted by Smitty @ 6:31 PM