Forum Moderators: rogerd
Wikis, though, allow overwriting and deletion of content. In this case, the opinionated poster can not only make his own points, but erase or modify those of others.
For the heck of it, I made a small change in the entry for my home town at Wikipedia. (It was a benign change, corrrecting a minor inaccuracy.) I was suprised that I didn't even have to register. A week later, the change is still there. I wonder, though, if I said the city was populated primarily by space aliens if someone would have caught it and reversed my change?
I visited a tech support wiki for an open source software project, and saw the downside of wikis - the tech content had been replaced by a page of spam links. I thought about doing my civic duty and removing them or reverting to an older page version, but I checked a few previous versions - they were spam, too. I decided to leave it to the admins or community regulars & moved on (without the tech info I was looking for).
Even without spam, I can imagine opinionated or biased users starting turf wars to keep their particular take on something visible.
So, here's my question - if you run a wiki community, how have you been able to keep the content on track and free of both obvious spam and not-so-obvious content slanted in some kind of inaccurate or biased way?
How scalable is the process? Just like a small forum, a small wiki can be monitored by one person; as the wiki grows, though, one person may not be able to read everything, and you'll have to depend on others to keep track of inappropriate changes and additions. What are your suggestions for dealing with busier wikis?
Trying to create an authoritative source of knowledge is, I think, the most challenging use of a public wiki. It’s certainly possible to produce quality articles and knowledge on a wiki, and I like very much the open ethos and egalitarian assumption that everyone has something to offer in terms of what they know, or their interest in the process of knowledge creation.
I think the big problem dogging wikis is overstretch. The growth of many wikis – the breadth or topics and sheer number of pages - outstrips the project leadership's ability to vet and ensure accuracy. The initial throw-down of information on a wiki can be staggering, but it’s likely to be a shining city with a dirt-poor periphery. Some topics or areas will have a hugely supportive, collaborative and engaged users, whereas others won’t, and there will be little interest in maintaining them.
One approach is for that leadership to ruthlessly manage the wiki’s content development goals. Deepen knowledge, before widening it; improve its quality before its quantity, and in-so-doing work towards never having topics that aren’t actively supported.
"The further action you take to moderate content (through the creation of editorial groups who have to approve changes; restricted editing rights to participants with offline qualifications in the topic area etc) the more the wiki simply becomes a replacement for exchanging drafts and publishing static pages for wider readership. Why have the wiki at all in that case, if the aim is never to have an open process?"
... but it now seems somewhat futile.
I have to ask myself whether Wikipedia, despite its 'success' is really a great posterchild for the wiki approach in general. What do you think?
I don't doubt that removing some of a user's anonynimity has some effect on their conduct, but what about the legions of people who login, post garbage and genuinely believe they're right? That appears to be Wikipedia's real problem.
I think putting some areas on "pre-mod" status makes sense, too, as well as locking some topics that are subject to factional warfare.
"With Wikipedia, the balance of knowing shifts from the individual to the social process. The solution to a failure of knowledge (as the Seigenthaler entry clearly was) is to fix the social process, while acknowledging that it will never work perfectly. There are still individuals involved, of course, but Wikipedia reputations are made and advanced by being consistent and persistent contributors to the social process. Yes, persistent violators of the social trust can be banished from Wikipedia, but the threat of banishment is not what keeps good contributors contributing well."
On the other hand, if I read an article in Wikipedia, I don't know what the last author's biases are, and will have to try to guess from the tone of the article.
To use the PHP example, I'd have to try to guess whether the article was authored by a PHP expert trying to present a fair case, or by a Python expert eager to point out real or imagined flaws in a rival language. In some cases that may be easy; a subtle bias is harder to detect.
