A characteristically upbeat item in the March 2004 Guardian commented that

It's easy to feel confused on your first browse around a wiki. Some might be tempted to dive right in and start editing every page they find, but like other electronic communities (think newsgroups or mailing lists), it's probably a good idea to lurk unobtrusively for a while first. Once you have a good sense of the right tone to adopt and the accepted way of using the site, you can start making changes.

The confusion is compounded when newcomers realise there's nothing to stop them behaving badly. Wiki sites are not usually protected and there's nothing to stop someone trashing pages, deleting good content and replacing it with rubbish. And, sadly, this does happen. Changes to wiki pages are stored in a database. If some one vandalises a page, the last "good" version of it is still available and can be restored with a click.

The consequence is that most of the time, wiki sites can only be vandalised one page at a time, and as long as there is a community of well-behaved users prepared to sort things out, problems can be fixed quickly and with little fuss.

     questions

Wikis face many of the questions asked about blogging.

Having a publishing tool -

• is not equivalent to quality
• does not address concerns about objectivity or defamation and
• does not obviate traditional publishing issues such as editorial standards, respect for intellectual property.

The shape of the wiki community means that major initiatives have been cruelly but with some justice dismissed as "the encyclopedia that Slashdot built", with extensive coverage of IT (and science fiction minutiae) but little attention to the social sciences and less to the humanities. If you are interested in Klingon surf the Wikipedia. If you are interested in Busoni, Namier, Marc Bloch, Heimito von Doderer, the Kea parrot of New Zealand or Christina Stead head for the Britannica or an individual study.

Wikigroaning highlights Wikipedia's bias. dismissed by some as a bias "toward things that don't matter". The Wikipedia item on Latin is shorter than that on Klingon. Its Archaeology is shorter than the item on Indiana Jones, Women's suffrage is shorter than the 'List of fictional gynoids and female cyborgs' and so forth. Measures of quality rather than length are more depressing, as noted later in this profile.

Wikipedia has also been panned as "an open-licensed rip-off of Encarta" and other online/offline resources, with Ethan Zuckerman for example commenting tongue-in-cheek that

Open a paper encyclopedia, paraphrase the entry on Alexander Hamilton and you've done a "service" to the Wikipedia community.

Andrew Orlowski commented in 2005 that

Although the project has no shortage of volunteers, most add nothing: busying themselves with edits that simply add or takeaway a comma. These are housekeeping tasks that build up credits for the participants, so they can rise higher in the organization.

Of the 200,000 registered users on the English-language Wikipedia, some 3,300 are responsible for around 70% of the content.

The frequent absence of citations (particularly to offline work published prior to the 1990s) and anonymous collective authorship means that it is difficult to assess the accuracy of wiki reference works. Proponents have argued that collective editing - illustrated through contributions accessible via the 'page history' link - functions as a form of effective peer review, commenting that

Wikipedia articles are extremely easy to edit. Anyone can click the "edit" link and edit an article. Peer review per se is not necessary and is actually a bit of a pain to deal with. We prefer (in most cases) that people just go in and make changes they deem necessary.

In practice recurrent editing to ensure a consensus about accuracy and filter out contributions by cranks appears to be the case only for those pages that attract significant interest. Areas that are the preserve of a only few enthusiasts have sometimes received dubious coverage.

For us much of the interest of Wikipedia lies in the editorial comments by contributors rather than the final product.

One wiki participant asked, in Wiki vs Web, whether wiki was close to the original vision of the web -

The Web was originally designed to make it easy to link information. It would be simple for people to write their various web pages, sprinkling links to other documents within.

ThisHasntHappened? [sic] Instead, we have the Web as a publishing model. We have the Web as magazines. We have the Web as TV.

Most people who browse the Web don't author their own Web pages. Those who do typically create a simple personal page and leave it at that. Personally, I think it is because HTML, the language that Web pages are written in, lies right smack in the middle ground between being too hard and too easy. ...

HTML is simple enough that any self-respecting geek can whip out a Web page in a couple of minutes using nothing more than Notepad. To a programmer, there isn't much call for a simple HTML editor. There is no need. To the average person, though, HTML is finicky, arbitrary and complicated. The average person, after ascending the learning curve enough to write their personal page, decides that they don't want to deal with all the funny tags.

It is unclear, though, whether the "average person" is that interested in dealing with a wiki engine or indeed contributing to an online resource.

     copyright and the gift economy

The wiki communitarian ethos has advantages and disadvantages regarding intellectual property.

As open content under the GNU Free Documentation License there are no access fees. Contributors are not paid and there is no formal 'star system'. Wiki proponents argue that

Knowing this encourages people to contribute; they know it's a public project that everyone can use.

The downside is that anonymity "encourages people to contribute" other people's work. Wikipedia for example features individual passages, images and discrete items that have been lifted by contributors without any apparent concern for copyright owners or - just as importantly - for attribution to the authors of that content.

One of the more spiky Gift Economy comments is that

Intellectual property is intellectual theft, a lie backed by law, a child of hubris and conceit. It presumes that it is possible to own ideas, to control them, and to dictate their use. It mandates that knowledge must always be a scarce resource to be hidden and hoarded and carefully metered.

Open source enthusiast Eric Raymond bracingly commented that "'disaster' is not too strong a word" to characterise Wikipedia, sniping that

The more you look at what some of the Wikipedia contributors have done, the better Britannica looks

There appear to have been no rigorous surveys but several of the major wiki collections appear to be enthusiastic recyclings of text that's readily identifiable on the web - textual clip-art - rather than work of original analysis or content derived from academic or other journals.

     studies

Given academic interest in open source and publishing developments such as blogging it is perhaps surprising that prior to 2005 wiki attracted so little attention from pundits and journalists.

Four sources are The Wiki Way - Quick Collaboration on the Web (Reading: Addison-Wesley 2001) by Ward Cunningham & Bo Leuf, How Wikipedia Works: And How You Can Be a Part of It (No Starch Press 2008) by Phoebe Ayers, Charles Matthews & Ben Yates, MediaWiki: Wikipedia and Beyond (Sebastopol: O'Reilly 2008) by Daniel Barrett and Wikipedia: The Missing Manual (Sebastopol: Pogue Press/O'Reilly 2008) by John Broughton.

They are complemented by sociological and informational analysis in From Usenet to CoWebs (New York: Springer 2003) edited by Christopher Lueg, the 2003 paper Applying the open source development model to knowledge work (PDF), by J Mateos Garcia & W Steinmueller, Phantom authority, self-selective recruitment and retention of members in virtual communities: The case of Wikipedia, a 2003 paper by Andrea Ciffolilli, the insightful 2004 Collaborative Authoring on the Web: A Genre Analysis of Online Encyclopedias (PDF) by William Emigh & Susan Herring, and Reid Priedhorsky's Creating, Destroying, and Restoring Value in Wikipedia (PDF).

The 2004 paper Manifesto for the Reputation Society by Hassan Masum & Yi–Cheng Zhang describes Wikipedia as a public good where reputation and other motivations substitute for direct reciprocity, a notion that is contested by critics who argue that anonymity reduces the investment that individual authors have in maintenance of their reputation. Andrew Lih's Wikipedia as Participatory Journalism: Reliable Sources? Metrics for evaluating collaborative media as a news resource (PDF) considers the vexed question of evaluation. Studying Cooperation and Conflict between Authors with history flow Visualizations (PDF) is a 2004 study by Fernanda Viegas, Martin Wattenberg & Dave Kushal

For a business case see Emma Tonkin's 2005 article Making the Case for a Wiki and Wiki: Web Collaboration (New York: Springer 2005) by Anja Ebersbach, Markus Glaser & Richard Heigl, complemented by Yochai Benkler's The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets & Freedom (New Haven: Yale Uni 2006).

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