Week 4 task 2 - wikis

Wikis are cool! This is such a big idea that people anywhere can add to and edit webpages together. And it appears to work.
I think that the most successful wikis are those with a pretty large subject area, so that people will refer to them, and possibly feel they can add to them. I had a look at wiktionary - the dictionary version (of course!) I think this is really exciting as it has the potential to remain very up-to-date; more so than books. As language changes, wiktionary could very quickly include new words and changing definitions, as they evolve. Because the editors are the very people who use that language, their definition is authentic. However I did look at the definition for "beautiful" and the English sounded poor to me; perhaps I should look into editing!
Also looked at Lyricwiki . (I chose this cos even 20 years on I still never get the lyrics right to some well known songs.) Again this is a huge area to write on, as there are so many songs! If you like music you may like to browse or add to this. I looked up the Fall and was delighted to see that not all songs are done, so I could theoretically go home and note down the lyrics to Paintwork ("Hey Mark! You're spoiling all the paintwork...!") as not all lyrics are available online or on album covers. This is something ripe for editing as lyrics are open to interpretation - especially the Fall's!!
Another one I looked at was the online novel - this looked odd, and had already been "closed" so no one else could add to it - so this is an example of something that is not sustainable after a certain point. Plus the English student in me baulks at the idea of many people writing one novel. But I suppose it could have been interesting. It certainly got people involved.
So... a successful wiki - a large but coherent topic area - something that interests many people - open ended - something with clear divisions for different pages - ...