At first glance, the LA Times taking down its wiki a week after launching it was the death blow to the undeveloped concept called "wikitorials." Rather than jump to conclusions, some bloggers have pointed out that the LA Times was only inundated with inappropriate changes towards the end, whereas it started out with many useful modifications, including sensibly breaking up the editorial into two parts, one for each side of the story.
Certainly the tendancy of humans to take advantage of situations cannot be ignored. Perhaps it was the commercial nature of the website that attracted company-haters and trouble-makers, whereas Wikipedia enjoys comparatively free-sailing as a non-profit? There may be some truth to this argument, but it is not the only answer because Wikipedia still suffers from ill-conceived posts. Search engine optimizers and affiliate linkers constantly try to sneak in URLs. Political activists try to change profiles of prominent people from fair-and-balanced to skewed one way or the other. But the backing of Wikipedia in the form of thousands of editors that patrol the site constantly, Wikipedia has on the whole been able to stay true to its goal of factually based entries.
The nature of the Wikipedia site makes the black and white line between what is factual and what is not significantly more distinct than its counterpart Wikinews. Current events are still issues in motion and thus oftentimes the facts have not all come to light, making justification for removing sections of Wikinews posts all the more subjective. Given Wikinews has struggled to gain a following, is this reason enough to abandon it? I do not think so. It is necessary for us to consider how wiki's can be reasonably controlled and monitored in order to produce content that is useful and trustworthy. In an impromptu survey of 10 of my friends, all of them had serious reservations about wiki's due to the issue of trust. After all, if even 10% of the content is incorrect, that is still unacceptable.
So say hypothetically you have a website that is a wiki but only certain authors by invitation-only can edit the content. Would that be effective in building trust if those people are identified on the site and are professionals? Is this any different than simply working on a word document for an article and forwarding it around to colleagues until it is finished? Perhaps not. The disadvantage here is that you cannot take advantage of the knowledge of other web users. Would having a wiki in this kind of fashion make the "approved authors" more productive than they otherwise would be forwarding around a word document? Perhaps, perhaps not. I suppose at that point you simply have a "wiki-blog" or a "blog-wiki" where every post is dynamic and can change at any time.
This is a topic with many open ends that I intend to continue to explore. I welcome your comments.
Just came across this blog post. eHow has changed to wikiHow and has seen significant traffic growth with wiki's dedicated to "how-to's."
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