As the Web evolved from the playground of hobbyists to the domain commercial users, the difficulty of maintaining sites capable of displaying massive amounts of information escalated rapidly. Content management systems (CMSs) such as Vignette leaped into the gap to help companies manage their sites. While CMSs remain a common component of websites today, the model they use is often one of outward publication: a specific author or organization creates content, and that content is then published to readers (who may be able comment on it). Wikis take a different approach, using the same system to both create and publish information and thereby allowing readers to become writers and editors.
The patterns illustrated in this discussion focus on collaboration:
Participation-Collaboration
Collaborative Tagging
You can find more information on these patterns in Chapter 7.
Publishing is often a unilateral action whereby content is made available and further modifications to the content are minimal. Those who consume the content participate only as readers.
Wikis may look like ordinary websites presenting content, but the presence of an edit button indicates a fundamental change. Users can modify the content by providing comments (much like blog comments), use the content to create new works based on the content (mashups), and, in some cases, create specialized versions of the original content. Their participation gives the content wider relevancy, because collective intelligence generally provides a more balanced result than the input of one or two minds.
The phrases “web of participation” and “harnessing collective intelligence” are often used to explain Web 2.0. Imagine you owned a software company and you had user manuals for your software. If you employed a static publishing methodology, you would write the manuals and publish them based on a series of presumptions about, for example, the level of technical knowledge of your users and their semantic interpretations of certain terms (i.e., you assume they will interpret the terms the same way you did when you wrote the manuals).
A different way to publish the help manuals would be to use some form of website—not necessarily a wiki, but something enabling feedback—that lets people make posts on subjects pertaining to your software in your online user manuals. Trusting users to apply their intelligence and participate in creating a better set of software manuals can be a very useful way to build manuals full of information and other text you might never have written yourself. The collective knowledge of your experienced software users can be instrumental in helping new users of your software. For an example of this pattern in use, visit http://livedocs.adobe.com and see how Adobe Systems trusts its users to contribute to published software manuals.