Just a quick post to draw your attention to a recent piece in The New Republic. It highlights the fact that for some topics, Wikipedia’s combination of a strict neutral point of view policy and its dependence on the wiki platform results in articles that leave something to be desired. (No, this is not about its occasional – way overblown – inaccuracies!) We were pleased to see the author, Douglas Wolk, practically arguing for the type of complementary writing tool we are developing.

Wolk explains why Wikipedia isn’t the perfect venue for reporting on politics and other potentially controversial topics. Here’s an excerpt:

Graceful writing takes a distant second place to neutrality. The language of the “Plame affair” article, like a lot of Wikipedia, is flatly declarative, not particularly quotable and occasionally afflicted with wobbly construction… And so the entry is an obstacle course of little infelicities and colorless clots of subclauses, from the first paragraph’s factual but pace-dragging citation of Joe Wilson’s memoir The Politics of Truth to the concluding section, headlined “Other perspectives on the CIA leak scandal,” which reads (following a link to “Alternate theories regarding the CIA leak scandal”) in its entirety: “Since the CIA leak scandal became public knowledge, commentators began presenting multiple and often highly-contested perspectives on it in various media.” You don’t say.

To make a case for how the parts of the Plame tzimmes fit together is, unavoidably, to make a political argument. That’s antithetical to the Wikipedia ethos, whose dedication to unvarnished facts is worthy of Dickens’s Mr. Gradgrind. Without some kind of thesis behind it, “Plame affair” is a dehydrated feast, a 20,000-word catalogue of notes and quotations and factoids that all have some bearing on the case in question but aren’t weighted for significance, have no particular narrative thread, and don’t begin to explain the meaning of the whole thing. It’s hard to imagine a Wikipedia that could function any other way, but the Internet hive-mind, negotiating in good faith and carefully hammering out compromise language, has done exactly what it was supposed to do–and failed anyway. The article, for all its catholic precision, isn’t actually useful, because it’s almost impossible to read… Wikipedia, friends, is boring.

Wolk hits the nail on the head. Generally speaking, and especially when it comes to controversial subjects, writers must make value judgments – whether writing individually or collectively. They must convey the order, context, and relative importance of an article’s components in order to sculpt narrative, digestible prose. As a tool, the wiki simply lacks the capacity to aggregate value judgments from a large number of contributors.

As regular readers of this blog know, this capacity is one of the central distinctive features of the MixedInk platform. We will allow contributors to focus not only on content, but also on style – which can be just as important in getting a point across.

(For more on how we intend to improve on the wiki, see this earlier post.)

As a collaborative writing platform, the wiki obviously has many strengths. I mean, Wikipedia is now the 9th most popular site on the entire internet. This simple cumulative editing system might conservatively be described as revolutionary. But let’s not dwell on the wiki’s impact, as it has been adequately explored (and then some) in many glowing reviews in the press, within the blogosphere, among the digerati, etc.

We believe that the wiki isn’t the endpoint in the evolution of mass collaboration. So, we’re trying to create a more perfect wiki by fixing some of its features which are…suboptimal, shall we say.

Here are a few areas in which wikis could be significantly improved (the first two are the most critical):

1. Wikis don’t allow multiple simultaneous editors. If two people edit at the same time, one of them either prevents the other from writing or overwrites what the other has submitted. Even if wikis did allow real time editing – and there is a least one wiki hosting company that now does – having multiple simultaneous editors would detract from the quality of writing and make for a discombobulating experience, as it’s impossible to anchor one’s edits in a static conception of page content if that content is constantly changing.

2. Wikis don’t allow for bottom-up expression of mass opinion. Wikipedia’s neutral point of view (NPOV) policy is necessary and appropriate for an encyclopedia, but what about cases where the community actually wants to express itself in a biased way? With wikis, disagreements on any significant point, or on the best way to structure an argument, frequently lead to back and forth edit wars. The only way to resolve these disputes is through the imposition of top down solutions – which are inherently undemocratic, inefficient, and generally antithetical to the principles of the user-generated content movement.

3. People are creatively bound by what’s on the page already. Whoever writes first in a wiki often sets the tone and framework for complex issues, making it more difficult for subsequent users to think about the topic in a different (perhaps better) way.

4. Recent users’ edits are more likely to remain in the wiki simply by virtue of not yet having been corrected. So instead of having the best (or most representative) piece showing, you just see the last person’s input at any given time.

5. Finally, many wikis lack what-you-see-is-what-you-get editing (this is true in particular of the Mediawiki platform used by Wikipedia).

Do you agree that these are issues? What else would you change with the wiki if you could? How could it be improved? What characteristics would the ideal collaborative writing tool have, in broad terms?

Your thoughts, please…