Why Wiki Works

Why Wiki Works

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The following 91 words could not be found in the dictionary of 581 words (including 581 LocalSpellingWords) and are highlighted below:

Folk appeal before bunch c2 camaraderie cgi com communities community consensus considered contacts count days delete deleted desire difficult discourse doesn don each easier far flames flaw follow generate gets hit hostile impact indiscriminate indulge insecure intelligence keep leaves masses meaningful much naturally nature nit nothing often online ornery our outside participants participate pedantic picking play playing professional rational read real recipe remains represent rocket science seldom signal site slow sorts sounds spam strengths surely terrible test than them they those trivia unreasonable unwashed us watchers weeks well who write wysiwyg

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Why wiki works:

any and all information can be deleted by anyone. Wiki pages represent nothing but discussion and consensus because it's much easier to delete flames, spam and trivia than to indulge them. What remains is naturally meaningful.
anyone can play. This sounds like a recipe for low signal - surely wiki gets hit by the unwashed masses as often as any other site. But to make any sort of impact on wiki you need to be able to generate content. So anyone can play, but only good players have any desire to keep playing.
wiki is not wysiwyg. It's an intelligence test of sorts to be able to edit a wiki page. It's not rocket science, but it doesn't appeal to the TV watchers. If it doesn't appeal, they don't participate, which leaves those of us who read and write to get on with rational discourse.
wiki is far from real time. Folk have time to think, often days or weeks, before they follow up some wiki page. So what people write is well-considered.
wiki participants are, by nature, a pedantic, ornery, and unreasonable bunch. So there's a camaraderie here we seldom see outside of our professional contacts.

See http://www.c2.com/cgi/wiki?WhyWikiWorks for more.

So that's it - insecure, indiscriminate, user-hostile, slow, and full of difficult, nit-picking people. Any other online community would count each of these strengths as a terrible flaw. Perhaps wiki works because the other online communities don't. --PeterMerel

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