Let’s be realistic here, save for the Wikipedia and a few other notable exceptions, wikis suck. I don’t need the L.A. Times failed wiki experience to remind me how much wikis don’t work unlessed they are heavily policed by a community.

A bold Los Angeles Times experiment in letting readers rewrite the paper’s editorials lasted all of three days. The newspaper suspended its “Wikitorial” Web feature after some users flooded the site over the weekend with foul language and pornographic photos.

Yahoo was also hit by this annoying Wiki vandalism in their developer area (see picture above). Why spam a bunch of developers with pron links? It’s sad that these cyber spammers can’t seem to be mature enough to handle the ability to edit and maintain helpful documentation but that community freedom is ironically wiki’s strength and Achille’s heel. Add that to the fact that some wiki users complain that most wiki software is kludgy and not user-friendly and it’s almost surprising that any wikis have ever spread wings.

Sure, if you have a large enough active, responsible community and/or a private area community that will self-monitor the content, a wiki could be a really great thing to add, but otherwise odds are it will meet the same fate as the L.A. Times. It’s sad how spammers ruin almost every good thing on the web. RSS is probably next.

Heck, it’s bad enough policing comments on a blog or moderating a forum much less having to expose an entire section of documents to Wikidom. Or maybe I should say Wikidumb.

Did this post make you go hmm?

 Loading ...

• Wikistress defcon 5
• Wikipedia battles with itself
• Wikipedia tightens the editorial screws
• Anon users barred from creating new Wikipedia articles
• Wikipedia passes one user’s information reliability test
• Francisco checks out Ubuntu