by Joshua Brauer on March 22, 2006
Dave Taylor has a great article in April's Linux Journal titled The Failure of Wikis. He nails the underlying problems with this form of mediocre way of creating and editing content. Perhaps the funniest part of the page is, however, a reader's comment "If you still have problems I suggest you start hiring smarter people or get smarter friends." The irony is that is exactly one of the points Taylor made - that wikians think those that don't get wikis are just too dense to get it.
It is a rarity to find a wiki that comes close to being as good as a page with comments on it. Each trip I make to Wikipedia leads to much more time spent editing incomplete or inaccurate information than is gained in the gleaning of information originally sought.
1 Comment
Not so fast
Perhaps Dave Taylor should stop by the Computers in Libraries conference in Washington, D.C., this week where wikis (aka "Multiplayer Blogs," according to Stephen Abram) are, perhaps, *the* hot topic of the conference.
And for all the flack Wikipedia gets for inaccurate information, a recent study found that, for scientific topics, it is every bit as reliable as Brittanica.
Collaboration is the beauty of the wiki. Remember that when you find errors in Brittanica, they don't trust you to fix them.