Why Wikis Rule

Many, many others have written about why wikis are wonderful. I think that there are two reasons that most others reduce to:

• easy distributed hypertext editing
• wiki syntax lowers the linguistic barrier for hypertext authoring-- wiki creation is somewhere between Storyspace (easy) and HTML (markup, but still harder)

There are certainly nuances and implications to these. You can do a lot more with HTML, but wiki syntax makes markup simple enough (reason 2) that it is a negligible barrier to entry. Wikis do some of the 'book-keeping' for you by automating some links and telegraphing the status of a link's destination (reason 1). The reader and the writing tool are the same (the browser) and are almost universally available (reason 1). Most wikis flatten text/file hierarchies, making a text's structure flexible and removing it as a barrier to editing (reason 1 and 2)

Wikis are excellent for having a group of people who may not be in the same place, may not have knowledge of HTML, may not know the structure of the overall text, and may have better things to do than worry about those things (like writing) focus on the writing.

The fact that wikis (and, to be fair, their predecessors) are now making the terms 'read/write web' or 'two-way web' usable shows that there is a ease-of-use cusp, that wikis have pushed us past. It's so much easier that it's something different.