Wikis are a technology that I'm vaguely familiar with - at least what they are in general. I understood that anyone can contribute to a wiki, though I didn't understand quite how that worked. After reading some of the articles and playing around a bit, I think I get it a little better. The possibilities of wikis seems pretty impressive: by enabling anyone to modify pages, you open your site up to an unlimited supply of collective intelligence. Wiki sites also become very welcoming and an inviting place to share ideas and expertise.
The downside, of course, is that anyone can modify the pages. Anyone including people who think they know about a topic but in reality know nothing and spammers or hackers who delight in making every visit to the website a nightmare. I've visited wikis several times - especially wikipedia - and have been pretty impressed with what I've seen. Unfortunately, I also have to continually take anything on such pages with a grain of salt. Information I find on Wikipedia is fine if all I'm looking for is surface value, but if I ever need to be sure of something, I may start at Wikipedia, but feel that I must verify anything I find from a source whose validity is less suspect. I still remember a fellow student in one of my classes who used Wikipedia as his main source for his presentation and was appalled to discover that not only were there many uncorroborated opinions, but blatently wrong facts as well.
One answer to this problem that I see is used in some of the other Wikis I've visited. Instead of allowing anyone to post, you must somehow prove that you know about a subject before you are cleared to edit a page. Either that, or having learned moderators who observe new content and keep innacurate information out.
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