Sometimes a Wiki Just Does Not Work
August 5, 2008 12:55 PM | Written by Yan Shikhvarger
Wikipedia has become a hugely influential and highly usable online property. It is consistently in the top 10 web properties in terms of users and gets around 53M unique visitors per month (Comscore). That generates so many page views that even Google started a competing property - Knol. Of course there have been many other topical Wikis started based on this incredible success of Wikipedia. There are Wikis for something as broad as recipes and something as specific as sustainable transportation. It seems that Wikis do well at compiling a mass body of knowledge but lack the social ranking mechanisms that help to bubble up relevant content.
A good example where a wiki just does not seem to function well is the wiki for tourism or WikiTravel. The issue is that it just does not seem to be that useful. Yes, it has basic information on many destinations and what to see, where to eat, stay but the problem is that it is indistinguishable which item is better than the other because of lack of rankings. It is simply a list. A site like TripAdvisor however, and its massive community makes it easy to understand which are the better hotels, restaurants, sites, etc... This is a big negative for any Wiki model which just does not have a built in mechanism for ranking content
Just compare these pages for a destination like Brooklyn, and see where you will find some good ones...
Brooklyn's restaurants from TripAdvisor
Brooklyn's restaurants from WikiTravel
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