An interesting experiment that seems to work

My current employer uses a wiki for internal documentation. I detest the markup and the structure. The "everyone can edit nearly everything" concept seems far too simple and trusting to be of any use.

But it seems to work. With smart application of versioning, and that darned markup that non computer scientists or designers can understand, the Wiki is an experiment with huge success.

The Wikipedia is the best example - a public contributed encyclopedia. Now that it's here it seems so obvious. Such little effort, but by a lot of people with an enormous aggregated knowledge. The law of averages means that most topics will be very accurate, and the sheer number of people means that even obscure topics will get coverage.

And no more door to door encyclopedia sales. (Actually there haven't been any of them for years).

Another favourite (from my 15 minutes of surfing) is This Might Be A Wiki—the official Wiki of the band They Might Be Giants.