Hypertext pioneers like
Tim Berners-Lee and
Ted Nelson always imagined a "read-write" environment. Weblogs have been getting most of the attention lately in examination of that point, but there's another format -- the wiki -- that many journalists may not know about. "Wiki" is supposedly a Hawaiian word that means "quick" or "fast," and I'll confess: I wrote off the wiki far too quickly. The idea is that anybody can update a document -- with some editorial control, changelogs, workflow, and recovery. But like the world of weblogs, the world of the wiki was dominated early on by self-referential content, wikis whose mission was to be all about the idea of the wiki. Frankly, they were boring.
But
Wikipedia, an "open-content encyclopedia" with more than 326,000 articles, has changed my mind. It's a phenomenal piece of work. Read some of the entries:
Murphy's Law, Korea's
Silla Kingdom, or the city of
Wilmington, Delaware. This is user-generated content at its finest.
How could news media use the wiki format? I wonder. There are dangers --
Disinfopedia, a collaborative wiki-based project that aims to document efforts "to influence public opinion and public policy," recently had a few bouts of bad information and profanity slipping through to the published view. But it's worth looking at closely.
