History Flow: the only way to convince yourself that the "wiki" is a valuable medium

research.ibm.com

4 points·theblackbox··3 comments

Found this a few years ago and always end up showing people. It really does show the "quality" and "persistence" of wiki data in a way that begs the "ohhhhh, yeah" moment

and if anyone wants to contest the "valuable medium" bit, I'm thinking the wiki hasn't properly come of age yet - for instance see http://www.scholarpedia.org/

I guess I just don't get why this would be "the only way to convince yourself that the "wiki" is a valuable medium". We use wikis at work without this, and I don't think anyone here would argue that it isn't a valuable resource. The history flow would show persistence of information, but for many sites I think it would be a stretch to claim that proves the quality of information.

I really didn't mean the quality of the information, this can be shown to be a social phenomena. What I think this illustrates is the quality/value of the wiki medium itself. I remember a lot of issues from my philosophy courses about wikipedia, the tutors seemed to think that the content of an article would change from day to day, one day taking one angle, the next being rewritten to another. I guess why I like this study is it shows the clear continuity of the information. Even though it is in constant flow. (hmmm....I wonder if there are computable threshold values? i.e. the age of an article, number of views/edits/users etc.)

I take your point, I did mean _wikipedia_ as there is no doubt that an in house wiki is a very good way of content management. But there are a lot of preconceived prejudices about open wiki's among the less well informed. I'm preaching to the converted here on HN, but then I thought people would appreciate the pretty colours =D

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