Weekend Update #5.1: The Wiki Effect

Fantasy novelist and scam-buster Victoria Strauss of Writer Beware discusses the newest Infinite Monkeys experiment, A Million Penguins, a "Wiki novel" set up by editors at Penguin and writing students at  de Montfort University. So (someone who works at) a reputable publisher is getting behind a collaborative fiction project, something that is sure to make Web 2.0 zealots start singing the "The Future Is Now".

If you're not familiar with wikis, the principle is that anyone can write, and edit, the content. Anyone, at any time. Imagine leaving a manuscript in a public park with a pair of scissors an a ballpoint pen, and you get the idea. I don't assume the project creators actually believed a readable, let alone publishable, novel would emerge. I hope it was intended to be an examination of how a project like this would fail.

It's easy and obvious to point out that the result so far is pretty shit (no, wait, it's been edited, it's now shite), but the real fascination is the utter chaos that has overtaken the project, after only a week (it's been edited again, it's now shiiiit). It's forked into multiple novels, which by itself is failure, if the expectation was one single work. Even the Penguin guy who's reviewing the process has said it "resists rational enquiry" - in his first post.

It's become its own author, in a sense, a self-evolving work, comparable to a novel in the same way that a well-tended garden is comparable to an overpopulated city. Pseudo-intellectual poseur that I am, I'm reminded of a passage from William Gibson's Neuromancer:

[It] was like a deranged experiment in social Darwinism, designed by a bored researcher who kept one thumb permanently on the fast-forward button.

There's little point in me saying stop writing, because the people drawn to contribute to such a project resist rational enquiry. Perhaps the most important criticism is that while I'm curious about the process, I have no interest in reading the result.