Wiki

Twitter is terrible because it requires no effort. At least, you could say that. But wikis are exactly the opposite. Wikis require a lot of effort, and Wikipedia requires the most effort of all. Twitter gives everybody a voice, but wikis gives you a chance to shut them up, too.

My wiki
Why not? If nothing else, it serves as an interesting form of writing, right? It's like a hypertext adventure, and Wikipedia is the biggest hypertext adventure in the world. So big, in fact, that it simply has no end. You can reach the end of the World of Warcraft if you really try. Hell, you can reach the end of this wiki pretty quickly too. But even though this is just my wiki, it doesn't have limitations. Things don't have to be encyclopedic. They can be utter bullshit. Hell, they don't even need to be in order.

So what happens if I wiki as often as my idiot friends twitter, for years upon years? It becomes some kind of record of my life, edit history and all. I could imagine it'd get pretty big too, huh.

Wikipedia
Wikipedia is half wiki, half pedia. That's not really a big shock. What is a big shock is wikipedia itself. From Twitter, we've already established that the world is a bunch of morons. So if you let all those morons write themselves an encyclopedia, what happens? That was a question some guy asked a few years ago, and I'm pretty sure most people laughed at him. He can't be serious, right? A bunch of unqualified people stomping all over each other's work, and how many "V14gr4" links exactly?

Turns out it's actually pretty good.

There are a lot of crazy feedback loops around Wikipedia now. Most journalists, for example, are lazy incompetent idiots. That's why blogs are such a big deal now, after all. So of course it makes sense that they do their research on Wikipedia, because it has all the information they need about everything, without the burden of actual fact checking or research. Wikipedia, on the other hand, relies on those journalists as credible sources. So when somebody makes subtle changes to an article at just the right time, those journalists cite it and become the credible sources for the information they stole off Wikipedia to begin with. You'd think that this would degrade the overall quality eventually.

And yet, it's still pretty good.

And then there's articles about polarising, hotly debated topics like evolution. You'd think there would be armies of creationists marching to destroy articles like evolution and abortion on Wikipedia, because it is the source and destination of all knowledge after all. In fact, if you're foolish enough to click on the Discussion pages of Wikis, you can even SEE those armies. They are frothing at the mouth about every single word, sentence, and punctuation mark.

And as if to spite those who wish to distort wikiality for their own purposes, it's still pretty good.

The best part is the damn thing documents its own controversies. It actually not only undergoes drama, but some loser looks at that drama and thinks to themselves "damn, that should probably have an article. It seems important to document accurately and fairly."

The creepy part is that sometimes, that loser is me.

Effort
Wikis, unlike Twitter, require a lot of effort. Twitter has no fonts or formatting or styles. You can't even edit things. For wikis though, you have to learn how to edit them, cause it's not HTML. They have their own wiki code. Not only that, you have to learn: how to edit discussion pages, how to sign comments on discussion pages, how to not piss people off, how to use a sandbox, that your childhood movies had horrible underlying meanings, and so forth.

And despite all that effort, people do it anyway. Your first edit? Usually deleted immediately. Imagine a blog that always deleted your first comment. You'd never make a second one. But for some reason when wikipedia does it, you're totally cool with it. In fact it's a motivating factor. I remember my first edit. I thought I'd make a footnote that the Juggernaut usually yelled "I'm the Juggernaut, bitch!" when he was doing stuff. It wasn't quite made up, after all. My footnote was deleted immediately, with a nice footnote to try the sandbox. And then I thought to myself, hey, maybe I should help contribute to human knowledge by editing this for real.

Why? Why on earth would I want to contribute to human knowledge? What could I possibly contribute, anyway? And yet there it is.