Blog v Wiki

The major difference between blog and wiki is their ability to collaborate. Blogs exist for personal sharing purposes, it is widely constructed around the author's style and personality. Nowaday, we connect blogs to its very own author as opinionated or influential as suppose to its popularity on the Internet. Wiki on the other hand, is more interconnected and is aimed for crowdsourcing. Meaning, a wiki page belongs to the public rather than to build around one author's preferences. In terms of collaboration, wiki takes the advantage because of its crowdsourcing basis. It is the platform where information are gathered and contributed by the public anonymously by choice. Whereas to blogs, every blog represents a platform where its author can publish private opinions, and to generate influence publicly is heavily depends on likableness of its contents. We often see bloggers collaborate for a project or to appear together in a couple contents, but their main purpose is still to generate followers by driving traffic to each of their blogs. As being said, what differentiate blog from wiki is its purpose to influence others by publishing opinionated contents. Whereas on the other hand, wiki's main purpose is to act as a publicly held platform to generate information made easy for anyone to search on the Internet.

There seems to have different ways of utilizing the free platform of a wiki page. Locher Margaret in "More on How to Build Your Own Wikipedia" indicates how businesses can utilize wiki as a crowdsourcing to their advantage. According to surveys cited in the article, "[a]lmost half of those who use wikis said they employ them primarily as a collaboration tool...[t]here are more positives than negatives to using wikis". However, there is a risk to providing such enormous freedom to public contents. According to Cohen Noam's article "A Rorschach Cheat Sheet on Wikipedia?", the freedom for users to publish any contents on the Internet runs the risk of encouraging public cheat sheets on exams. "Psychologists have registered with wikipedia to argue that the site is jeopardizing one of the oldest continuously used psychological assessment tests", where thousands of psychological scholar papers have been done based on exam taker's answers. As much as the positive reflection on the free platform, wiki like everything else also contributes negative effects that could potentially threaten major researches.

Wiki's existence has been transforming how information is passed along traditionally, it is time to expand on its primarily usage as the platform to collectively collaborate knowledge. There may have one more way to further transform wiki usages is perhaps to collaborate with education. By properly install the wiki software into the educational system in all institutions, it can build an interconnected body of students, enhance team projects, and open the opportunity to learn outside the classroom with other students who share a mutual interest in a variety of subjects.