Wikiwriting

Wikiwriting is the practice of producing written content within a wiki by multiple contributors. It treats articles as collaborative projects rather than single-author documents and uses the wiki’s revision history to track changes over time.

Key features of wikiwriting include open editing, discussion pages for negotiation and planning, and community-driven style and citation guidelines. Content is typically licensed under open licenses, enabling reuse and modification by others. The process often emphasizes a neutral point of view, verifiability, and avoidance of original research, in line with common wiki policies.

A typical workflow begins with an initial draft or import of material, followed by incremental edits to improve accuracy, structure, and tone. Contributors add and verify citations, link related topics, and use templates or infoboxes to standardize presentation. Major edits may be discussed on talk pages to reach consensus before being integrated into the main article. Edit summaries provide a record of changes, supporting transparency.

Benefits of wikiwriting include rapid refinement through collective expertise, transparent revision histories that reveal how content evolved, and resilience through crowd-sourced quality control. Challenges can include vandalism, edit wars, uneven quality, and systemic biases that reflect the demographics of contributors. Effective wikiwriting relies on active governance, clear guidelines, and a culture of constructive collaboration.

Scope and usage vary by platform, but wikiwriting is central to many knowledge projects online. Prominent examples include encyclopedic wikis such as large collaborative knowledge bases, as well as educational and organizational wikis that aim to document widely used information.