Open Wikis – Great Idea that Doesn’t Really Work

43 Best Blogs is Dead.

At least it is for me. For now.

It was a great idea: Set up an open wiki to showcase the best blogs on the web. With it open, anyone can edit the list at anytime, adding in the blogs they think best, deleting those that they don’t feel measure up.

In theory by tapping into the wisdom of the masses the very best blogs would very quickly bubble up to the top of the list. In their own words,

How do we know that we have the right 43 blogs listed at any one time? Easy, you are the “we” at 43 Best. We’ are you. You spin me right round. Other lists depend on the work of one or two individuals. If you use this site please place the 43 Best badge on your site or at least blog about it – this gets more fun if more people know about it.

Add a blog, delete a blog. The answer to Web 2.0 is ’43′, so please leave the site with the same Zen as you found it. FYI – just click on approve to approve the links.

Big Problems

There are two significant flaws with the wiki as it stands.

The first one appears to be insurmountable: Spam! The spammers have discovered a Page Rank 5 site where they can simply go in and change all the links to whatever they want.

And they do.

Every single time I’ve clicked through the badge on my site here in the last few months I’ve landed on a page full of links to porn, pills and gambling. (I was looking for a ‘p’ word for that last one, but I couldn’t come up with one.)

There are people who are fighting back. Often when I look back through the edit history I see where they’ve changed it back. But as often as not it brings me to problem number two.

Many good folks don’t know the markup for wikis. I’m not a wiki expert, but I do know this particular one doesn’t use straight HTML. In fact, if you code the links with normal HTML, the page gets all jumbled and hard to read.

No Good Anwsers

I wish I had a good suggestion on how to fix at least the first problem. Making people register with the site in order to make changes kind of defeats the purpose of the list.

Another answer would be to have someone monitor the page, change the page back when spammers strike (and fix the formatting issues). But I fear that would be a full time ’round the clock operation. Spammers are nothing if not persisitent.

So it is with great sadness that I say, “43 Best Blogs is dead.”

I guess unless there comes a day when bad people stop doing bad things, having a web site where everyone can change the content means it will eventually be taken over by spammers.

Whenever someone comes up with workable solutions, I’ll be back in. ‘Till then the badge is coming down from SuccessCREEations.