With the overwhelming success of Wikipedia, it would be hard to say that wikis were a complete failure — wouldn’t it?

A little while ago, Luis Suarez from IBM posted some thoughts about wikis. where he quoted from Jeremiah’s Strategy Weblog, who was in turn quoting from a conversation with a respected technologist:

“The problem with wikis is that people suck.”

Jeremiah’s point is that for all the hard work that goes into creating a working wiki, there is some jerk who is going to deface or delete as much as possible just to be, well, a jerk.

Jeremiah also goes on the qualify the ‘people suck’ statement by saying that it’s only some people that suck.

But couldn’t we extend that argument to email as well? Luis points out that the same effort has not gone into cleaning and protecting wikis that has gone into protecting email (from spam). So couldn’t we logically conclude that the problem with email is that people suck?

The problem with wikis, email or any other technology is not that people suck (or that some people suck). It’s more that people that might not otherwise suck will do some pretty stupid things when they think their anonymity is guaranteed.

The web is full of this kind of behaviour. Forums are notoriously bad for it — people will often say things in forums that they would never say to anyone face to face.

‘Low-bandwidth’ communications media (where each party is relatively anonymous and doesn’t have many real, human cues from the other party) are always going to be prone to these types of problems.

Jeremiah’s two pointers about creating wikis that work are to:

• Define a community and a limited content scope
• Find trusted members and empower them to edit, or provide permissions.

I agree with Jeremiah’s suggestions, but I think that the second point could be elaborated on to include reducing the anonymity of wiki users to get them feeling more of that sense of community.

Maybe you include pictures in people’s profiles or a few harmless personal details. While there’s no guarantee that someone couldn’t fake these credentials, it does provide an overall greater sense of community — and a larger burden of guilt to the people who are now that defacing nameless people’s accumulated work, but the work of real people with names and faces.

And remember, when creating a wiki, it’s important to create some initial guidelines that lay out the purpose and rules for your wiki. That way, everyone’s clear on what can be done and what can’t.