Wiki Tikki Tavi

Why does everyone complain about wikis? Do they not know what wikis are? When abuse of the wiki system takes place, why are people surprised?

I'm all in favor of the communal sharing of knowledge and all that hippy bullcrap, as the kids from South Park would not put it because they would undoubtedly use the word "gay" as a pejorative, but come on people. Relying on the basic human goodness of the world is an exercise in shattered expectations.

Note that I'm not saying that there is no basic human goodness in the world. Far from it. But if you expect all humans to exhibit this basic goodness, you are doomed to disappointment. And that, unfortunately, is what most of the wiki community continues to do. Sure they have grudgingly come down from their Utopian visions and introduced some controls in an effort to minimize the damage that a small minority of people do, but the premise of the wiki system relies on people basically not being assholes, and that's a major flaw. Note, by the way, that I am not pointing a finger at wikipedia, but at the wiki idea in general.

In a controlled environment, wikis have their uses. I've never found one personally, because most of the time the environment has to be so controlled that some other form of content management would work better, and the rest of the time the environment isn't controlled enough and the problems start. But I suppose that somewhere in this great world of ours, there are uses for wikis which don't run into the problems everyone has with them. I've had to use them because people have a thing for them, but I can't say that I've ever liked using them.

But wikis implicitly rely not just on the goodness of all mankind, but on the goodness of a certain subset of mankind that uses the Internet. That's iffy. Then there's the fact that most of the people who use the Internet don't use wikis, so that cuts out a fair number of basically good humans right there. So you're left with people who are idealistic about wikis, and people who see wikis as an ideal target for their basic not-goodness.

If wikis worked in a way where the large numbers of idealists could cancel out the small (or possibly large, depending on how I'm feeling about humanity in general and people with too much time on their hands in particular when I make this statement) numbers of assholes, then all would be well. I think idealists usually care more about being ideal than assholes care about wrecking ideals. Maybe I'm wrong. But in any case, this is not the way wikis work. One bad apple can spoil the bunch in a small community. So wikis are destined to be just like they are, which is why I guess I don't get why people complain about them.

Participation in a wiki is like belonging to a club. In this case, it's a club of people who weren't invited. Depending on the level of security in a wiki, it can be anything from a wall for graffiti (not a bad use for a wiki, actually, so maybe there's one use out there) to something that isn't really a wiki. A public wiki is a club of people who care enough to join, and since joining can be accomplished simply by visiting the wiki in the first place, it's not a terribly exclusive club. Why does it surprise us that the club's open bar never has any ice cubes (that was an advanced metaphor; don't try this at home kids)?

For the record, I use wikipedia. Like everything I find on the Internet, I take it with a grain of salt. I then take it with an additional grain or three of salt depending on what topic I'm researching. And I then take it with the final grain of salt with which I take everything. Overall, it doesn't taste too bad. But then I don't spend my life making sure my wikipedia article hasn't been deleted.

And Blogger can spell wiki, but not its plural.