Wikiality & Truthiness

I am a wiki skeptic.

I can see the benefits, and that lovely little video made a lot of sense. I’ve been known to look up certain pop-culture terms in Wikipedia as it’s so quickly responsive to new slang or the latest episode of reality TV that I don’t bother to watch. And yet, I am skeptical.

Maybe it’s all that MLS training – I can’t get over the idea of choosing information from reliable sources. How on earth can you determine the reliability of something written by anyone and everyone? Admittedly, this is mostly a problem with large, fully-public resources like Wikipedia – motivations for the contributors are unknown, and thus you don’t know if someone is trying to convince you of something that’s not necessarily true or right or socially acceptable. At least if you have a website (or book) written by a certain person or company, you can get a sense of what perspective they’re writing from and read with a more informed eye. But with a big wiki you don’t know who wrote what, and the phrasing they choose sometimes can be biased or slanted, sometimes subtly enough that the average reader could miss it. And then, of course, add the problem of various TV personas (read: Stephen Colbert) who, as a joke, convince a whole heck of a lot of people to change Wikipedia’s elephant entry to read that they (the elephants) were overrunning the world rather than seriously endangered and should all be shot before they take over.

Then there are the problems of people who contribute naughty or mean things out of spite or venality. Even in the examples of wikis we were to look at for the 2.0 Exploration, there have been problems: the Library Success wiki said, "Because of vandalism problems, e-mail confirmation is now required." Wikis provide a semi-anonymous public forum to continue flame war stupidity.

Those are the big problems I have with wikis. I also have a couple littler problems: First, they tend to be ugly, awkward, un-aesthetic, text-heavy beasts. They’re boring to look at and hard to read without snoozing. Take the ALA 2007 Conference wiki. I remember looking at it when I was preparing to attend that conference, but deciding it wasn’t worth the effort and going elsewhere, even though I find now they had a link to exactly what I wanted (a list of vegetarian restaurants). I just couldn’t find what I wanted easily enough, and I had other means at my disposal that seemed easier.

The other problem that occurs to me also has a lot to do with motivation – or more precisely, the lack thereof. It requires a group of people who care about the subject, who are invested in the project, to keep it current. I have seen for myself how a group of people with strong motivation can still let the project wiki lag for long periods of time. At least if someone’s a webmaster, they are presumably paid in order to maintain their focus and updates.

So what should we do with wikis at work? Well, I don’t know. I can see how something like the New Tech wiki might be of use... But if a group spread across branches were creating some sort of document or presentation, I think I’d prefer online office tools instead of a wiki.