A wiki is a web site where any visitor can view and edit any page, can create pages, and can roll back changes from other users. This approach has had a surprisingly amount of success over the last few years. Probably the most celebrated wiki is wikipedia (wikipedia.org).
It will be interesting to see if the million penguin wiki succeeds at all. While the high level structure of a novel as a whole is well understood, I'd expect a lot of difficulty converging on a common thread for the story. Particularly when the level of antagonistic contributors is likely to be high.
My first Citrix wiki was for brainstorming on a high-tech business proposal with a senior cross-functional team. While there was a good amount of interest, it was surprisingly difficult to get complete engagement.
Why? Well not everyone fully understood what a wiki was (this was a few years ago). There was also a surprising amount of Resistance to using a mark up language and to changing other peoples text. Mostly though, I made the mistake of expecting that the technology would drive an emerging structure. (The romantic notion of 'wiki nature').
Wikis rely upon having a well understood overall structure, so the wikipedia encyclopedia approach works well as everyone has a good idea of what an encyclopedia should look like (stand-alone articles with cross references).
From a business perspective, the wiki is an important tool for content management and collaboration. However, the technology is not magic and should be treated as a tool. Here's my short list of minimum requirements for success:
- Tied to a corporate or business unit goal
- A commonly agreed structure
- A commonly agreed purpose
- Ownership by one or more team members
- Well constrained topic
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