They will, however, enable collaboration and teach us all something very important about what a true democracy is all about.
"They will not help a writer develop a personal voice. Matt Barton, provides a candid yet light hearted response to your concerns in a posting on a list, which is repeated here for convenience of access.
Wikipedia was preceded by the Nupedia project, which also aimed to build a free content encyclopedia. When comparing closed versus open authoring approaches, it is worth looking at the history of Wikipedia, which has succeeded in creating the largest encyclopedia in history. The Wall Street Journal Online has an interesting debate between Jimbo Wales of Wikipedia and Dale Hoiberg, editor in chief of Encyclopaedia Britannica, and you may find this to be an interesting read as well. Can both open and closed authoring models produce high quality material? To find out more, consider the Wikipedia article on the reliability of articles.
In your opinion, do you expect to find significant differences in the quality of content when comparing open and closed authoring approaches? Given the recentness of the wiki phenomenon, research on this question is limited. Reading There is divided opinion and a healthy debate among educators concerning the quality of content developed in a wiki environment.
there are a wide range of open source software wiki's to choose from so licensing costs shouldn't be a barrier to installing an institutional wikiĪdvantages in one context, may be disadvantages in another.the wiki has no predetermined structure - consequently it is a flexible tool which can be used for a wide range of applications.widens access to the power of web publishing to non-technical users.the wiki software keeps track of every edit made and it's a simple process to revert back to a previous version of an article.people located in different parts of the world can work on the same document.
Wikis are instantaneous so there is no need to wait for a publisher to create a new edition or update information.