Blogs and Wikis Compared

One issue mentioned briefly in our seminar was the relative merits of blogs and wikis for presenting the issues in a debate. Our four debates have been presented in four online formats--blog, wiki, parody news site, and parody congressional testimony. Three of these are wiki-like in the sense that they lay out sets of arguments instead of carrying on an ongoing dialogue, so I'll restrict the basic comparison here to blogs and wikis.

I think the greatest strength of blogs as a forum for debate is also their greatest weakness, depending on what you're looking for. This strength/weakness is the fact that they resemble a conversation instead of a statement of position. This is a strength because, in theory, it facilitates a more in-depth discussion of the pertinent issues. You don't have to predict from the beginning exactly which issues will be important; you can let it develop based on commentary from the opposing side. This is also a weakness because it's a lot harder for an observer to follow. If you click into the middle of an ongoing blogger debate, you essentially have to start from the beginning, which involves searching through archives and clicking back and forth between two (or more) blogs. (This is slightly easier if the blogs have tags.) In contrast, on a wiki, the two opposing sides are likely to be clearly written out and organized. Generally a blog is better if you want if you want to see a back-and-forth debate and you have the patience to retrace it to the beginning and follow it, and a wiki is better if you want a more static (and probably easier-to-follow) statement of the issues.

Of course, I'm generalizing. It's possible to post arguments for two sides of a debate very clearly on a blog, and it's possible to have an ongoing dialogue on a wiki. But blogs are designed to be organized by time, whereas wikis are designed to be organized by theme. I don't think that either format is necessarily "better" for a debate; it depends on what kind of debate you want.