Blogs vs. Wikis

“Wikis harness the wisdom of crowds, serving as virtual commons where participants can wrestle over ideas and information until something approaching consensus—or the truth—emerges.”

-Gardiner Morse

Wikis are web pages that anyone (who has permission) can create or edit the content quickly (Goodnoe). Wikis differ from blogs, because blogs serve more as an online notebook, or journal, with entries categorized by date and time and usually have only one, or two, moderators (who have to scan the comments and posts for spam, vulgarities, etc…). Wikis allow for anyone to moderate any alterations or comments made to the wiki pages.

Both wikis and blogs serve as a means of collaboration, more so with wikis. Wikis allow for anyone to input their knowledge fast and easily onto a webpage creating an extensive source of information coming from numerous sources. Blogs have the ability to do the same, although, a user cannot modify another user’s entries (no peer editing) on a blog. Wikis, more than blogs, allow for the convergence of many ideas, of net users and data, into one space (a wiki or blog).

Because of a wiki’s simplicity, there are used for a number of things (e.g. for business plans, proposals, group projects and anything that requires collaboration). However, I think it would be interesting to incorporate digital art (jpg, gif, tiff, bmp, etc…) into the world of wikis (most wikis are text-based). Thus, one might create a digital picture (not necessarily a photo), which anyone could add something to. It would be interesting to see a piece of art to which anyone could add their own brush stroke (mouse click is probably a better term).