Arguments
- wiki provides a core knowledge of information that is uncensored by powerful commercial or governmental organizations. Wiki participants are intelligent people who will verify the information they are receiving. People who distrust wikis have not thought through the consequences. For every saboteur bullshit artist, there are two angels who would repair the damage.
- Any and all information can be deleted by anyone. Wiki pages represent nothing but discussion and consensus because it's much easier to delete flames, spam and trivia than to indulge them. What remains is naturally and mostly meaningful.
- wiki is not wysiwyg. It's an intelligence test of sorts to be able to edit a wiki page. It's not rocket science, but it doesn't appeal to the TV watchers. If it doesn't appeal, they don't participate, which leaves those of us who read and write to get on with rational discourse.
- wiki is far from real time. Folks have time to think, often days or weeks, before they follow up some wiki page. So what people write is often well-considered.
- wiki participants are, by nature, a pedantic, ornery, and unreasonable bunch. So there's a camaraderie here we seldom see outside of our professional contacts.
See www.c2.com/cgi/wiki?WhyWikiWorks for more.
Certainly, these arguments, if they can be so called, do seem a bit hostile - I might even call them elitist. I am an enthusiastic wiki advocate, but certainly there is no need to confuse such enthusiasm with a vehement denunciation of those who feel less secure, or perhaps feel more paranoid, about the security of factual information. Certainly we can simply say, "Yes, if you're worried for the safety of information, you really should verify it yourself -- Heck, if you'r e that worried, why not just post a disclaimer at the top of the page expressing that concern!" Wiki's work because nobody, not even the cranks, are left out, and because most of the people most of the time are competent enough to notice and correct the cranks' malfeasance. (It might also be noted that this is why non-computerized life keeps "working" most of the time). --c.b.e.o'k
So that's it - insecure, indiscriminate, user-hostile, slow, and full of difficult, nit-picking people. Any other online community would count each of these strengths as a terrible flaw. Perhaps wiki works because the other online communities don't. --PeterMerel
I think Wiki is weird and prone to sabotage. It presently works, because it's not well known and no one really cares. But try implementing Wiki on a Yahoo-level site--it would be total chaos! (anonymous Wiki opponent). Then again, look at Wikipedia ... it's bigger than Yahoo in my opinion, and it's working well ...
I don't think it's slow.. maybe some of the complex ones which run off databases and try to do too much? --LarsOlson
Your change was 4 minutes old when I saw it. If it had been real sabotage, I would have removed it. -- ThomasWaldmann 2002-03-22 09:56:53
When you said "Yahoo-level site"... you mean like the Wikipedia? It seems to me to run smooth...
I agree with anonymous, if I wished, I could have deleted this whole page. Perhaps a user base system with logins would make more sense.
Anonymous -- how much traffic do you suppose wikipedia.org gets on a daily basis? It maybe not be quite yahoo level, but it's certainly not chaos either. But yes, some pages have been locked after repeated vandalism. Having an administration team is still nice on a wiki. Also, if you did delete the whole page I could look at the history, and reload a version before you erased the text. -- Bob/Paul
I've had things like the Thinki FrontPage wiped out in the middle of summer, and then restored to its old self by some anonymous friend. So far, I deny access to a handful of ip-addresses, because they have deliberately messed things up. That seems to work. The amount of useful additions outweigh the work to fix vandalism. And the fact that it's easy to contribute is important.
With MoinMoin it is ok. Some versions like OpenWiki and Ward's Wiki only keep a couple of recent versions and then recovering stuff is very hard. I am still trying to recover some of the syndicate lists on the former overwritten with spam. You need a pretty plugged in community if you depend on them to recover rapidly-- AndrewCates
What if Wiki software added the following capability - kept track of changes by ip, and if it found that changes by someone from a certain ip were reversed on a regular basis by multiple other ip address users, it would end up automatically black listing the ip user who gets reversed a lot - this would also seem to fit in the wiki spirit
Before I turned on text captchas on my wiki, I had to revert a lot of spam manually. It was the rare exception, not the norm, for spam to come from the same IP address twice. More often, similar-looking spam came from several very different IP addresses, about once every hour or two, overwriting the same page. IP blocking would have done nothing, although I did block some IPs at the firewall level if they fell into the "rare exception" category. -- greycat, wooledge.org/mywiki/
If you click on the "info" icon, you can access any old revision of this page. So even wiping a page does no permanent damage as one can easily restore an undamaged older revision. -- ThomasWaldmann 2002-05-12 10:19:54
- There's a Denial Of Service waiting to happen. Just keep submitting changes to a page and one of two terrible things may happen: disk fills up, or revision depth is exceeded and original work is lost.
You will quite likely end up on a IP or content blacklist before the disk fills up. BTW, there is no such thing as a revision depth, so nothing will get lost. -- ThomasWaldmann 2005-05-10 20:39:40
We use Wiki on an internal site at work that is for documentation - the precise qualities of Wiki make it very well suited for this purpose - it's editable by anyone, at any time, for any reason. There is a revision history of all of the pages in the web. As for the concept of user accountability - we require login to edit, but logins are open to anyone..... - JonStanley
How far back in history can you go with the diff's? Can you set somewhere on MoinMoin how many revisions to keep? -- -- -- DavidCollantes 2002-05-21 10:38:57 Firstly, Wiki is not meant for Yahoo! level sites. It is just for people to put in their thoughts. Somebody wants to delete the whole site, that is his thought. - general_failure
Maybe but the defences at Wikipedia (which is more than one million pages) seem to work well on vandalism and spam. Defences against claptrap are another matter --AndrewCates
Which brings me to my particular interest. As an educator there are some exciting applications for WIKI. However, shortcomings obvious to adults might be difficult for students to recognize. The "trolls and boneheaded idiots" can come off as the "experts" to a young mind....middle school teacher My english teacher told us that we could not use any thing that comes from wikipeida as a referance. Claiming we needed more Reliable Sources. - r00m23
That's what the Big problem with public wiki's is, for me at least - people are very trusting. It's a natural tendency of most people to be quite trusting of authoratative sounding statements - even when they are made without any evidence or are actually someone's opinion stated as a fact. This is not a problem with popular/well known subjects - someone will come along to add the other point of view - but with more specilist and less well known areas, anyone can become an instant expert and not have anyone to contradict them.
I'd like to say that was just a matter of educating people to not take things at face value all the time, but that's just people
--RolandGlew
- it's written: "but we still need hierarchal-like organization", I don't see any argument here, for me this is just cultural background.
- it's written: "the ridiculous prospect that any idiot can come by and destroy stuff for kicks", once more, this is just a mind view, this is what we (all ?) believed at the beginning of wiki, but what we (almost) never see. Experience is sometimes different than "theory" :o)
- it's written: "what is needed is a simple authentication method", any authentication method can be broken, one of the best solution (like in wikipedia) is: login if you want. But I don't think this is really important as soon as you can get someone else's identity, there is a risk. If someone blocks my account, I will create a new one or take someone's account. Just because people who should be banned are not banned and respected, there is a cultural training. For me the process described above of "new account / block again" is the tragic initial mistake of the repression model. The consequences are more often new sabotage than comprehension. And the last sentence is really wrong, the more you ban someone, the more the will he'll have to come back and create more important damages.
- I agree that login does not solve everything. (I keep seeing wiki compared to a "yahoo size"...so here we go.) I have this one program(thier are many like it.) that can automate the new account making process. I can do about one every 30 sec. It is that slow only becouse yahoo requires you to enter in some letters and numbers that show up in a picture. Many accounts are needed to do such things as kicking other users out of the system by sending them hundereds of msgs. I have made over 300 accounts(called bots.). Creating an account maker is not hard and can be done for almost any website. - R00m23
- . IP banning has been proven to help in some cases. (As seen here in this wiki, but also in many places online.)However, its not flawless. When Im working in a yahoo system I will go through proxys and assume thier IP address as mine. If I get block, just switch to a differant proxy. Also consider that thier are many publicly accessed internet connections were the users IP address does not follow them. This could be a problem to a user who is denied access simple becouse some one else(could even be a hacker) did the worng thing.- R00m23
But anyway this is very instructive. The most powerful "proof" for me is what is written at the beginning by someone: "I agree with anonymous, if I wished, I could have deleted this whole page." but this never happened (except for an experiment like you can read later on that page) :o) For me the wiki power is the freedom power. If you give someone more freedom, there is a big chance that he will appreciate it and be thankful. If you give someone less freedom, there is a big chance that he will try to get more freedom by all means (usually by infringing "laws").
- Interesting... this is 2006, and some of these same issues are still not resolved. But, Wikis continue to grow stronger... Jan 20, 2006
- In regards to the shortcommings of Usenet, I believe that Wiki has these as well, which is lack of connection (or investment, call it what you want). My experience of Wikis today is similar to my experience of Usenet in its early days. The signal / noise ratio was very high, just as on Wikis today. When a person with some special charter and _lack of connection_ to the Wiki come around, he may use that "media space" to press his charter, whatever that is. Something which those connected to the wiki will perceive as noise (it's got nothing to do with what's discussed).
- As long as there are more active signal suppliers than noise suppliers, we will see the wonderful results we see here today. However, when todays mail and usenet spammers become aware of the "media space" and audience available on wikis, there will be tools for automatically introducing noise on wikis all over the web, and people actively promoting something other than what a particular wiki was intended for. Until then we will have fun. After that, we'll probably manage to come up with something that gives us the ability to have some more fun. Personally, I believe that the distributed key signing architechture of PGP/GnuPG will be a tight fit for this task. A page change that is unsigned will be anonymous, and will be "accepted" by someone who reads it and signs it. If you want your changes to stand for them selves, you will have to get your key signed by someone who is accepted. If your key is signed by someone who is misusing their privilege (signing spammers keys repeatedly), they will become "untrusted", and you will have to get your key signed by others in the community. In short, a formalization of trust. While browsing the wiki, you will have the option to read only the latest signed revision of a page. Regards, Per Gunnar Hansø.
- I guess a constant supervising is very needed in any Wiki site... If not, I think a Wiki site would kill itself pretty easily... Brrrrrlbllb.... I don't know..... - ceefour
- I think that the Wiki is a good forum and given the way in which the page is changed, people are inclined to change it in ways that are non-destructive -Jason
All users, esp. RecentChangesJunkies are supervisors. And if you have no reasonable users, your site is dead anyway. -- ThomasWaldmann 2002-07-24 06:15:12
(Brian)-"You are all individuals!" (crowd)-"We are all individuals!" (Brian)-"You have to be different!" (crowd)-"Yes, we are all different!" (loner)-"I'm not."
(This is my first encounter of Wiki, and within a minutes of reading this page, I edited some grammar, snuck in a couple of winks, and gave the above comment. BTW, found about wiki via the comedi project...) IamSil
- Don't forget my favorite... Brian: You have to work it out for yourselves! Crowd: Yes, we have to work it out for ourselves... Tell us more!
They're not saying they're opposed--only that they think such attempts are doomed to failure. I'm fascinated by the concept of anarchism, and the idea of a wiki, but looking at a site like Metababy--an HTML wiki, with a bug that allows one to completely delete pages--gives me pause.
- Yuck! I had a look at Metababy, and really regretted the experience. Looks like wiki could become just another way for sickos to get their kicks. Wasn't it de Tocqueville who said something like, "America is great because its people are good. If its people cease to be good, it will cease to be great"? A community prospers or fails by the acts of its constituents. If a wiki can be sabotaged by one bad actor, what chance can it have? == A Deliberate Sabotage ==
This page deliberately sabotaged... with the best of intentions.
On the original version of the page an opponent of Wiki claimed if I wished I could have deleted this whole page. However Wikis survive such things because, I suppose, people who care about a page restore them. Since there are old established Wikis out there, and they dont get trashed, I assume it works.
So I have deleted the whole of the WhyWikiWorks page and replaced it with this test. My guess is that the old page will be restored reasonably promptly. If not I will restore the old page myself in a day or two. Either way I will report on whether the test worked.
NickHollingsworth 08 Jul 2002.
I have restored the original content of this page on the same day on which it was sabotaged. I had never used a Wiki before, I was just curious about this concept and wanted to know WhyWikiWorks. The challenge above immediately made me want to prove that such a sabotage would not succeed. I quickly learned how to view a diff and how to restore the page's previous content. However, I do not know how I would have reacted had I been confronted with a real, malicious sabotage. Perhaps I would not have looked further into Wiki, convinced on my first visit that it does not work.
FelixBreuer 08 Jul 2002
- A different result from the one that I expected! I had noticed that at least one person was subscribed to the page and thought they would see the change and replace the original. Instead a passerby replaces it. Same outcome I guess; and a lot sooner than I was expecting.
NickHollingsworth 08 Jul 2002.
Wiki's strength is just an issue of balance. The balance of good and bad. Currently, the bad ones are too few to constantly destroy the things built by the good ones. Hence, as long as the good ones represent the majority of the population Wikis will live. A Wiki turns the balance towards the constructive people, giving them the means to overcome the destructive people by sheer speed of the reconstruction of torn down infra- structure. - dat.r0x@gmx.net 15 Sep 2002 (It's just like Star Wars except with Jedi Gnomes.)
Destructive actions against a wiki are like kids with spraycans tagging your fence. They get the most reward if the tag stays there a while. If you clean it the very next day, they are less likely to bother doing it again. While this psychology protects a wiki from individuals and small groups, there is the possibility that large gangs could take turns keeping a site in disrepair - but its the sort of thing that once you've got your kicks it could easily turn boring. However, a wiki is probably best for consensus information. Running one as a minority on a generally unpoplular topic would be lot harder. --Ben Coman, Perth Western Australia, 16 Sept 2004 - hey, it seems this comment is exactly two years after the one below. Another strength of wiki?
I like Wikis because they remind me of Hypercard. I have a personal wiki running on my Laptop, and a Group Wiki on our Intranet, and there are even Open Wikis like this one. All in all they can be quite useful - and who said that you can replace everything else with it??? -- HeyHey 16 Sept 2002
- Talking about hypercard and information organization, I wanted to add - I used to use a program called "info-select" for managing my information. It had a very convenient interface. But it was very difficult to share.
- Since moving over to Linux, I started using Jedit. Now that's my information organization program - I just arrange things in files and use jedit's searching facilities and macros/shortcuts/plugins to find the info I need. I also started writing Docbook. Jedit and Docbook both have moin pages. And the real cool synergy comes from a couple of places - first, the ability edit pages directly inside Jedit thanks to the moinmoin plugin. Very cool. I just started running my own moin and I am kicking myself for not doing it sooner! The possibilities for information organization and sharing are endless. But now, I'm using moin to plugin non-editable content. I have a book I am writing which I plan to publish. I want to make the content available inside the wiki and allow people to make comments. I embedded the generated HTML from a docbook inside a moin page by writing just a few lines of python code in a macro. You can add comments below the macro, but you can't touch the book. Moin is not just editable pages - it's an OO framework for building webapps too. Very flexible if you know python.
--AlanEzust 2004-07-24
I like Wikis too, even though I heard about it yesterday for the first time - but what about the dangers? Anybody who reaches this site could change my ((and your) and yours too!) texts, nobody can be sure if he/she(or it!) wouldn?t be traduced by changing his/her text, for example into something racist...
I think I wouldn?t start up my own public Wiki, but I think I?ll visit some Wikis in the future. Greetz from Berlin/Germany -- Oli 16 Sept 2002
- Well, I am just a day old in wiki .. I dont think there are too many people who really want to sabotage this concept .. after all we live in a free world with all kinds of people around .. look at our sysadmin .. there is always a good for bad .. tit for tat kind of thing .. if someone deletes this page , he would restore it and the sabotage will be unsuccessful .. long live wiki =)
I am completely fascinated by the Wiki...
- I love Wiki, but one thing that has struck my mind: what if someone decides to edit the front page and insert some horribly gross illegal porn picture or whatever? Sure, it will be deleted as soon as someone comes along, but in the case of a smaller Wiki, this can be hours, and during those hours random people can come by and visit, be offended and never visit that site again. I think the answer this though: If the Wiki is big, it will be removed within seconds/minutes; if the wiki is small, sabotagers will not care. Or something. --SimonK?gedal
Yes. It can take some hours if you have a very small, not often visited wiki. But then it won't be seen by many users anyway (it is not often visited
). If you have a well-known wiki that is often visited, it will only last some minutes and won't be seen by much people, too. So it is a bit annoying but not a big problem anyway. You also may put the FrontPage into read-only mode, because that page needs not to be changed often, but is the most inviting one for various idiots doing dumb stuff. -- ThomasWaldmann 2002-12-01 11:44:15 why bother?
This wiki thingy is absolutely incredible. Totally configurable, conveniently editable, and completely based on the honor system. It's an intr-a-net's best friend.
= LONG LIVE WIKI = -- JimmyMiller 2003-01-06 17:03:00 .
Thoroughly confused by WikiWikiWeb stuff. Very haphazard navigation, no centralised focal point. No wonder it works so well. It's like some kind of nerdish cult. Only smart types will get involved and so you don't get the people who want to sabotage it. However, the integrity of what people say can be questioned. Someone could just as easily come in here and edit my words,***oooh I almost did, but I think I'll settle for a deranged digression: really, maybe the wiki just challenges the ego concept of words. I mean, they certainly aren't mine anymore, now that they are yours (or yours). This wiki stuff rocks. Now back to your regularly scheduled broadcast (now was that so bad? and really, how much of what we (i you) say and write is really holy enough to worry to much that it might get edited or even mangled?)*** negate my statements with a single word and I'll be none the wiser. I couldn't be bothered to put back what had been erased or ruined. I'd just leave it and do something else. Perhaps I would eat beef stroganoff. Perhaps I would take up the trombone. Perhaps I would write that single word on a single sheet of paper, take the paper out into a green field alone, and contemplate the idea of the internet. Perhaps I did not even write this sentence, or paragraph, but then... who or what am "I" after all, in a place such as this?
- Tried just this sort of thing at school with a wordpad file left open on the screen. People just added stuff to it all day. Then the saboteurs entered and started paki-bashing a friend of mine so they took it off. Didn't work.
- Make it easier, make it auditable, give it some integrity. Nice idea needs more work.
Wordpad has no memory. Wordpad has no community. Wordpad has no revert. Wordpad is not wiki.
- The user was conducting an experament in his local envirenment. True its not wiki, but imagin spending hours working on a home work assinement,, then going to get a quick snack and coming back to see people had edited what you wrote.(Even worse is if you don't know that they changed any thing.) What if they added a cuss word or two hear and thier. A good soltion is to save. In comparison wiki is kind of(meaing, not all like, but simler) like a text file sitting open waiting for people to change. A good soltion might be to save(aka, an old copy reverted should it be entirly delted.) - r00m23
. Um, Wiki is meant to be "haphazard" so that it becomes self-organizing. I doubt it could be made much easier; it is auditable (by the community that cares about it); and it has self integrity (much like us, in fact!). The idea is one that is already reduced to its simplest, optimum format. There is no more work to be done on it. If you dont understand this you haven't ever tried the real thing. MeDerek.
- The user is saying that the experament needs to be easyer.(MOre like wiki.) Wordpad needs to be more auditable.(Perhapes if you could view the screen of the test computer, from a computer farther away.).
- Make it easier, make it auditable, give it some integrity. Nice idea needs more work.
- Wiki relies on the users or 'passers-by' it works great in websites with numerous users however on small 'never heard of' sites it would not work. But still on Yahoo! howeaver it would not work either because everybody would think someone else would do it. Wiki works well where the conditions are good but perishes where the conditions are bad.
MauriceAlbert P.S I just think Wiki is amazing, how it secures itself while being so open.
As it turns out, smaller wiki communities tend to have less vandalismanyway, as less people are aware of them. Also, smaller wikis tend tohave larger percentages of active participants, so the first activeparticipant to find the vandalism generally isn't that far away. -- LeeDavisThalbourne
- Not stated among the arguments for and against wiki is the obvious: that you can easily secure wiki behind an intranet, and that is where wiki excels, among a contained, gated community, where trust is implicit and granted on the basis of all individuals being known to the community. There are secured wikis on the Net as well. They don't provide complete security against vandalism, yet the rollback and versioning/difference capabilities of some of these wikis is reason enough to pay attention to wiki as an important collaborative content tool.
DavidMattison, 2003-05-20
I just installed moin^2 yesterday on our company intranet server (debian) and already people are using it. Needless to say, they're all technically minded so they know how to behave. I must say, I'm just blown away with the idea, although I have been wanting to look at wikis for ages. It just never occured to me that anyone could edit the pages, so I never got the idea of wiki-communities. It's great, I love it, and now maybe I'll have to work some :-).
AleksandrKoltsoff, 2003-05-28