

What supplanted the wiki – and why? - porker

About 2001 wikis were all the rage; popular and pointing to a sharing-future.<p>Sure we&#x27;ve got big wiki sites (Wikipedia, Wikia) but they haven&#x27;t gone mainstream in the way a blog or CMS has. Why?<p>Was it because companies found they can make more money from users when the information is shared differently (Facebook)?<p>For corporate websites, for whom collaborative editing was never needed (no thank you, I don&#x27;t want the public altering my site) other systems might have made more sense -- but the wiki&#x27;s flexibility and ease of expansion are useful features.<p>There have been newer developments, such as the federated wiki [0], but checking around again for a platform with collaborative editing, an audit trail and an approval process, I felt I was back in 2003. Nothing has changed. Why?<p>[0]: http:&#x2F;&#x2F;hapgood.us&#x2F;2014&#x2F;11&#x2F;06&#x2F;federated-education-new-directions-in-digital-collaboration&#x2F;
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nostrademons
Wikipedia is totally mainstream, and it now has sister-sites like Wikiquote,
Wikia, etc.

There are also a lot of smaller niche sites that use wikis in one particular
domain, eg. A Wiki of Ice and Fire, Wiki 24, Hunger Games Wiki, etc. And Wikis
are often used inside corporate networks as well - Google certainly had one
that was quite active.

I don't think Wikis have been supplanted at all. They're just no longer at the
top of the hype cycle. They get used when they're appropriate, people are
productive with them, but emotional energy is directed instead to newer
technologies.

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brudgers
The problem with wikis is they have little self curation. Wikipedia without
waterfall management becomes the wikiwikiweb[1]. The information in a wiki
isn't self organizing.

The successor may look more like StackOverflow. Topics aren't siloed and
additions of information are low friction. It's easier for users to slice and
dice information to fit their needs...I can search for SQL and Modula2.

[1] [http://c2.com/cgi/wiki](http://c2.com/cgi/wiki)

