Why Wiki Works?
Note: The items below are not totally valid in this Wiki. This is a more controlled wiki, so to speak.
- Any information can be changed or deleted by anyone. Wiki pages represent consensus because it's much easier to delete flames and spam than indulge them. What remains is naturally meaningful.
- Anyone can play. This sounds like a recipe for low signal - Wiki gets hit by the great unwashed as often as any other site - but to make an impact on Wiki, you need to generate real content. Anything else will be removed. So anyone can play, but only good players last.
- Wiki is not WysiWyg. It's an intelligence test of sorts to be able to edit a wiki page. It's not rocket science, but it doesn't appeal to the video addicts. If it doesn't appeal, they don't participate, which leaves the rest of us to get on with rational discourse.
- Wiki doesn't work in real time. People take time to think, sometimes days or weeks, before they follow up some edit. So what people write is generally well-considered.
- Wikizens are by nature a pedantic, ornery, and unreasonable bunch. So there's a camaraderie and understanding here we seldom see outside of our professional contacts.
So that's it - insecure, indiscriminate, user-hostile, slow, and stocked with difficult, nit-picking people. Any other online community would count each of these as a terrible flaw. Much like
Dada philosophy, perhaps wiki works because the other online communities don't.
Source: Portland Pattern Repository∞
See also: WhatIsWiki
CategoryWiki
