Re:Ask HN: YC S10 startup wants your opinions about wikis
by philwelch on Friday May 14, 2010 @03:04AM
(#1346757)
There's Wikipedia, and then there's wikis.
Wikipedia is an awesome resource because hundreds if not thousands of people every day actually collaborate on it. There are a few big public wikis that are like this, too, but Wikipedia's the main one. Of course, Wikipedia has a toxic and idiotic culture, but they wrote a not-bad encyclopedia. That's fine.
Wikis, on the other hand, are usually just a repository for single-author documents which are, at best, sparsely updated by that single author when he is bored. They don't spin up to full collaborative potential if they're just a documentation repository for a group that has real work to do. They're just another bin of poorly updated documentation.
Wikipedia is an awesome resource because hundreds if not thousands of people every day actually collaborate on it. There are a few big public wikis that are like this, too, but Wikipedia's the main one. Of course, Wikipedia has a toxic and idiotic culture, but they wrote a not-bad encyclopedia. That's fine.
Wikis, on the other hand, are usually just a repository for single-author documents which are, at best, sparsely updated by that single author when he is bored. They don't spin up to full collaborative potential if they're just a documentation repository for a group that has real work to do. They're just another bin of poorly updated documentation.