Relentless Consensus Engine

The problem, said Ward, was that wiki was a relentless consensus engine. And for certain things (e.g. encyclopedias) that might not be a bad thing, but as a way of working it had its drawbacks.

[…]

Ward looked at these problems in 2011 and proposed a new direction for wiki, one he termed the “Chorus of Voices.” The idea of the Chorus was that a wiki page’s title could Form a Hub for a number of individual, personal takes on a single idea, the way a Hashtag can form the hub of a conversation on the web. In the chorus, wiki editors don’t edit a single page: each editor creates their own version of the page, often out of the materials of previous pages (through a process called “forking”). Clicking on a link to a page on “The Causes of the Cambrian Explosion”, for example, would deliver to you one version of that wiki page, but make you aware of multiple other attempts to explain the same thing, often based on other versions of the same thing.

The Problems of Textbook Publishing Are the Problems of Wiki blog