Wiki’s and their failings
I’m perennially impressed with Wikipedia. Seldom does a day go by that I don’t pull the page up at least a couple times, especially on my morning news reads. When you want to get a overview of a historical topic, it’s hard to beat.
And then there’s the RubyOnRails Wiki. It’s painfully cluttered, and each topic is strewed with various solutions, some quite dubious. So while I sometimes find a useful tidbit on there, I often just continue my search elsewhere.
What’s the difference in these two wiki’s that makes one so successful, and the other a slurry of half-answers. I’d surmise that the problem lies in a lack of final authority. Wikipedia has it’s guardians on each page, and while one can skew topics, you can’t ignore that facts. On the Rails wiki there’s no one right solution, nor a person to enforce some standard way of doing things, and therefore it gets out of hand.
I’ve also used the Facebook Developers wiki, which is actually very well organized and maintained, but maybe it’s addressing a different problem - documenting an API, not trying to solve various programming dilemmas.
What’s the answer? What makes wiki’s so great for some technical data, and so bad for others?
I think it comes down to the culture behind the wiki you are dealing with. With Wikipedia what you have is laregely a community of historians (or history buffs) and scientists editing the content; in other words, people who can write and care about it being correct and well done.
On the other hand, ask a bunch of programmers (no offense) to start contributing to a site like that, and I for one wouldn’t be surprised that the result is largely unhelpful.
Just compare the wikipedia articles on ruby, for instance, to the ones on Beethoven. Even there, there’s a noticeable difference.