I am thinking more along the lines of the loss of quality of previously high quality articles, which are already incredibly small in proportion, such as "featured articles." Traditional content production methods asymptote in quality, but the editing process in place at Wikipedia (which is only one possible wiki process, and also one of the most successful, but does not necessarily speak about wikis in general) encourages articles to gradually increase in quality, and then again decrease. It is unknown if they will stabilize (which brings about thoughts of a 
1.0)<br><br>There are plenty of examples of this phenomenon: <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Former_featured_articles">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Former_featured_articles</a><br><br>This could be due to changing featured article criteria, but in general, the claim that simply starting a wiki encourages high quality content is lacking evidence. If anything, wikis encourage the addition of noise to high quality content. Adding noise to turing complete wiki syntax can quickly snowball, turning into an aggregation of media that lacks coherence.
<br><br><div><span class="gmail_quote">On 8/29/07, <b class="gmail_sendername">Reid Priedhorsky</b> &lt;<a href="mailto:reid@umn.edu">reid@umn.edu</a>&gt; wrote:</span><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
Desilets, Alain wrote:<br>&gt;<br>&gt; I need a good solid reference to substantiate the following claim:<br>&gt;<br>&gt; &quot;Besides leading to high quality content, wikis have been shown to be<br>&gt; good tools for fostering the emergence of active communities&quot;
<br>&gt;<br>&gt; Does anyone know of a good research paper that looks specifically at<br>&gt; this kind of impact of wikis?<br><br>Hi Alain,<br><br>The following work by Dan Cosley et al. argues that wikis and<br>traditional review-before-publication result in the same quality, but
<br>wiki gets there faster:<br><br>Cosley, D., Frankowski, D., Terveen, L., &amp; Riedl, J. (2006). Using<br>Intelligent Task Routing and Contribution Review to Help Communities<br>Build Artifacts of Lasting Value. Proc. CHI 2006.
<br><a href="http://grouplens.org/papers/pdf/itr-chi2006.pdf">http://grouplens.org/papers/pdf/itr-chi2006.pdf</a><br><br>(Full disclosure: this work is a product of my own research group.)<br><br>HTH,<br><br>Reid<br><br>_______________________________________________
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