Power and Pain of Wikis

As wikis don't force any structure on how you write and organize your content things have to ``evolve'' somehow. But that does not come without an amount of friction as you only fix something if it is disturbing you and the more often you have to fix someone else's pages the higher your personal barrier gets to do so. This inevitably leads to a spiral of death and this wiki instance will die. So the effect of people writing quite bad pages in the beginning and don't learn how to do better might propagate and have long-lasting effects on the community. That in itself is nothing new but the ease you create bad content, stale content, lose content and the rising threshold to compensate and/or tolerate this makes it quite a danger to wikis ending abandoned. And we see abandoned and spammed wikis a lot. Go google youself.

The only way to grant a certain minimum of standard quality to content is to press your users into structures that they must obey to. And this is certainly quite non-wiki.

Example: at our department (NatS) researchers must prepair one talk per year at least to introduce the others about the scope of their ongoing work. That's called ``Oberseminar'' at german universities A NiceThing(tm). So people get a page on the wiki where they are told to put an abstract about their talk. Effect: they all do it differently, which is ok unless some minimal standards are fulfilled (e.g. giving information where and when the talk will take place, who is talking, funding, linking back to the time table, and so on). This is all pretty obvious stuff, right?. No, it isn't, even for trained professionals, sadly.

The only way out, as I said, is adding a corset -- TWikiForms, where they fill in their data. But, alas, I resist to go and make such a fart a more or less complicated TWikiApplication. Sigh.