Evaluating Blogs vs Wikis

Blogs emerged in the mid 90s as “weblogs,” and its user-base surged as publishing tools allowed people to post content on a webpage without having knowledge of cumbersome HTML formatting skills. They originated as personal journals that are shared publicly, where people could share their musings on topics like music or politics. Because of their personal and unconstrained style, they’ve attracted a wide audience. As time went on, however, the format of blogs has become increasingly diversified. Instead of long, rambling posts on Blogger, people began to favor shorter, image-rich posts on sites like WordPress and Tumblr. Twitter, the micro-blogging offspring is also another prominent example. In addition, in the past half decade there has been a significant shift towards content farming, where sites like Buzzfeed or FiveThirtyEight have multiple authors and blog categories; the upside of the shift from personal to communal blogging is that together, each individual has a larger audience reach. Although blogs are significantly more fragmented than wikis – whose aim is to gather information in one place – the total traffic and influence of the blogsphere is arguably far greater. It has transformed what we consider journalism: “Unlike newspapers or television news, blogging is not capital-intensive; there is no centralized registry, no editorial oversight. All a writer needs is access to a computer.” (Gill) Blogs currently number in the hundreds of millions, with approximately 175 million Tumblr blogs and 75 million WordPress blogs alone.

Wikis had similar origins in the advent of the Internet Age. with the first software released in 1995 by Ward Cunningham. Its appeal primarily emerged from the relative simplicity at the time of its markup language, which enabled groups of users to format a page hierarchically to suit their needs as well as to create pages which are cross-referenced. Compared to blogs, the drawback of wikis is that it does not enable significant customization of webpages through CSS, but the conformity of its appearance is often considered a plus. Blogs have distinct and highly customizable appearances, but they also may not be geared towards minimalism or readability. Wikis are an effective way for consistently conveying large, overlapping amounts of information, as evidenced by the encyclopedia Wikipedia and the proliferation of wikis for various projects. Blogs are geared towards the present moment, whiles wikis have the ability to archive and allow information to be accessed at any given time. Through wikis, information is constantly rediscovered and re-edited.

Speaking frankly, I don’t think wikis are the wave of the future in the business world – although they are valuable, they only satisfy a niche. Wales posits in the Harvard Business Review article that “The rank and file are installing the software on the corporate network, because they’re finding that wikis are the best way to get their work done.” (Morse) The claim that wikis is the best way for organizations to host files and content is plain wrong. Content management systems like Drupal, Joomla, ModX, are taking hold in many digitally-oriented companies, and they frequently are the most effective tool for collaboratively managing workflow. Larger corporations can use frameworks like the more elaborate Enterprise Content Management systems and SaaS, plus Microsoft’s Sharepoint is an option. Although the trend certainly hinted at it in the mid-2000’s, I can’t see wiki’s, with their User Experience drawbacks, surpassing more sleek business solutions. Case in point, I’m critiquing wikis on a WordPress blog.

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