rebelutionary / 2.0

When wikis don't work - mass journalism. / 2006 Sep 06

Despite the best intentions, it seems to me that Wired's wiki experiment isn't really working.

Ryan's original piece was neat, concise and to the point. Ryan is a journalist, so unsurprisingly it read like a professional piece.

Perhaps I'm being too harsh, but the edited article produced seems to be less precise and less insightful. It's almost twice as long now - 1000 words has become almost 1900. In reading the new piece I don't feel twice as informed at all. I'm a big a fan of simplicity (I love The Economist's economical writing style for example) but I think most would agree that more content doesn't always equal more depth.

I'm not saying the article is going to do more harm than good to wikis - something about all press being good press - but to me the experiment in collaborative journalism isn't a good example of where wikis really work.

Is this because wikis don't work?

No. Wikis work. Well - and this is going to be hugely controversial for some - wikis work when used correctly. Journalism by every man and his dog probably isn't the best example of where a wiki will help a group.

Ross made a slightly snarky comment in a recent piece on WebProNews:

So far, contributions have been constructive and civil. Only exceptions so far have been from wiki vendors plugging or trolling (which is suprising given how they should, in theory, know the tool).

Au contraire - wiki vendors know the power of the tool which is exactly why they're plugging themselves in the piece. As the vendor of the largest enterprise wiki - I know this. Every other vendor knows this.

Think about it.

Here you have a wiki page which is going to become a Wired article. It could be published in a national magazine. It could be on the highly read Wired website for eternity. It could reach a huge audience.

Is it any surprise then that everyone remotely interested in wikis is editing it to put in their 2 cents? Are we really shocked that every wiki vendor tries their product or service linked in the final piece?

It doesn't seem surprising at all. It seems obvious. I can't believe no one thought this would happen.

I'd say simply that the interests of the parties are misaligned. Ryan wants the article to say something about the wiki world. Wiki vendors want a link from Wired.com. Certainly, wiki vendors want it to be an accurate piece - but they also want it to be an accurate piece with them in it. Amusingly, the recent changes page reads like a whose who of the wiki world.

This misalignment of incentives leads to bloated, long lists of links. The article trends towards becoming a directory of wiki vendors, not a piece of simple, insightful journalism.

For those who remember the failed LA Times wikitorial experiment, it suffered a similar fate. There a mischievous public drove the wiki offline. Most people in the broad 'editing populace' weren't at all interested in producing quality newspaper editorials. Wikipedia combats this problem (somewhat) by frowning on edits made by people closely associated with the topic.

Wikipedia also doesn't have the mad edit deadline that the Wired piece has - all edits made by September 7th will be immortalised in a published article. When people troll Wikipedia, it will eventually be cleaned up over time. With the Wired experiment this infinite-time-to-improve factor isn't prsent.

Collaboration works better (by that I mean produces a better end product) when a group has a common incentive. A group of employees collaborating on a corporate project wants it to be a success, enthusiastic people around the world edit Wikipedia trying to improve global knowledge and academics share their research on wikis to enable better peer review.

Perhaps a group of 5 Wired journalists collaboratively editing the same piece would have been a better experiment.

Hopefully then it would have been a good example of the power of a wiki rather than a bad example of the power of incentive.

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