Sherry Chandler

I am really not wiki literate, but Harry Rutherford raised some ideas a while back that I wanted to follow up on. One of those “when I have time” things. Even though Harry says the Poetry Wiki is dead (see comments to yesterday’s post), I wanted to go over to the site and play around and have something intelligent to say about it. But now I’ve raised the question of Wikipedia, I’m going to just let Harry be intelligent for me:

…I once set up a site called The Poetry Wiki. Technically I suppose I still run it, but it never really attracted enough interest to need any running. …Anyway, the point of the Poetry Wiki was to experiment with collaborative poetry writing…anyone would be able to edit any of the poems, and … something would emerge – who knows what. In the event, it didn’t catch on.

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Friends may not be poetry, but it’s still good of its kind. Would twenty poets sitting around a table be able to work together in the same way? If they were being paid enough, of course they could, but would the result be better than any one of them would be able to produce alone? I don’t know. But I don’t think you can dismiss the idea out of hand.

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The internet is the most profound change in the way we present and receive writing since the invention of the printing press. Sooner or later, it’s going to produce a new form of literature, just as printing eventually made the novel possible. … The advantage of a wiki is that it is designed to allow repeated editing of the original text by multiple users; most of the other kinds of online community (blog, forum, mailing list) involve threaded discussions, which means that much of the action would happen a long way down the thread. With a wiki, the latest version would be the first thing a visitor would encounter.

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Wikis are designed to be democratic (anarchic, in fact), open-access, non-hierarchical, intertextual and dynamic. For some people, this is not simply the way that wikis happen to work; it is an ethos which the wiki embodies. As a comparison, Wikipedia is actually quite heavily structured compared to the original wiki software, and there are people who feel that the hierarchy of users with different powers and, for example, the ability to lock pages, is a betrayal of the WikiWay. Despite this, if you spend some time editing Wikipedia, you’ll still encounter plenty of wikienthusiasts who feel that wikiness is actually a positive virtue in itself.

Take the question of open-access. The classic wiki model allows any visitor to edit any page anonymously without even registering with the site. Wikipedia allows this, and is successful because there is a sufficient mass of well-meaning users to compensate for the casual vandalism of passing idiots. Partially this is because the site appeals to exactly the kind of people who are best suited to it - geeks. That’s not intended as an insult, btw; I’m enough of a geek myself to have accumulated a few hundred edits on Wikipedia (and to have started a poetry wiki, for that matter). That geekiness, which is so well suited to painstakingly arguing over fine points of detail, works well for fact-checking. Attention to detail is also important to writing poetry and literary prose. The question is whether you’d ever get a critical mass of people who were not just well-intentioned, but had the literary judgement to know whether an edit was improving or killing a sentence.

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Wikis also have a distinctive structure; they’re modular, distributed and accretive. They have no centre, no hierarchy, and they grow a bit at a time in no particular direction. That structure is perfect for an encyclopedia, because encyclopedias are inherently modular; if the article on Dickens is crap, it doesn’t affect the article on Thackeray.

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Even more profound as a change from printed literature is that wikis are not normally linear. They make use of links between articles in the way which has become familiar for anyone who uses the internet. There have been various internet attempts to accomodate hyperlinks in literary forms; none of the ones I’ve seen have been very convincing. But to use a wiki to compose a novel or a selection of poems without linking would be to eliminate a major part of the functionality of the software.

All these possible conflicts – open access vs. membership, dynamic vs. convergent, modular vs. holistic, linear vs. hyperlinked – are conflicts between whether to just use a wiki as convenient software for collaborative authoring, or to embrace the wiki as a way to do something new.

If we imagined literature that embraced the full possibilities of the wiki, it would be a radical vision indeed – the wiki as one big hyper-poem or hyper-novel, openly authored, non-linear, hyperlinked, associative, evolving, mixing traditional narrative prose with poetry and who knows what else, and with a thousand routes through the text. It’s a sexy idea; radical, progressive and dramatic. And if you’re interested in the ways that new technologies shape our art, it makes more sense to produce art that is shaped by the technology available, rather than using the new technology as a way of slightly extending our ways of making traditional forms. None of which is worth much if the result is an unreadable mess. Would it ever offer anything beyond novelty value, let alone any kind of advantage over traditional forms? It’s one thing blurring the line between writer and reader, another to produce a text which is only any fun if you edit it yourself.

For once, I’m not claiming I know what the answer is (there could be several answers). Perhaps the very idea of collaborative literature is stupid; perhaps a wiki is the wrong software to produce it in any case. But I find it interesting to consider the possibilities.

You can find more collaborative poetry at WriteHere.net