From MyWiki

A Wiki, but Why...?

Once upon a time, the internet was a strange place for new and inexperienced users. Sure, even 10 years ago, a lot of information was already available, but it was sometimes very hard to find and only "insiders" knew how to actually use the net for researching and improving their knowledge about a given topic.

But it was even harder to share your own knowledge so that others can benefit from it. "Putting stuff on the net" was often something, only IT professionals were able to manage and even those people had to learn a lot of things before they could upload a simple page to the net.

Collaboration

In most cases, a team of experts on any given topic will produce a better result than a single expert alone, no matter how qualified this single person might be. We are all humans and sometimes we make mistakes and nobody is perfect. If a single person writes an article and no other one proof-reads it, the possibility for mistakes is usually greater than if the article had been created by multiple persons.

A small example

Let's assume, you are an expert on cooking barbecue (yeah, silly example, but nothing better came to mind and I was actually hungry when starting to write this article :) ). Let's also assume, you, while surfing the net, stumble over an interesting article about cooking barbecue, written by someone who must obviously be an expert and knows a hell lot of things about barbecues and cooking in general. Anyway, you read that article and find some flaws in it. Also, a few ideas how the article could be improved come to your mind and since you are a nice person, you would actually love being able to share your knowledge.

But you cannot, because the article has been written and published in a closed manner. There is no way to edit it. Now, the only thing you could possibly do would be contacting the author or publisher and offer your help in improving the article. Depending on many things, that could either be accepted or denied - in the latter case, the story would probably come to an end, the article would never get better and you'd be left with the only other option - write your own article about cooking barbecue from scratch and publish it on the net. Obviously, that could be a lot more work than just improving the existing article and therefore, it may never ever happen.

... things would be a lot easier. You could just hit the "edit this..." link and start typing and when satisfied with the result, publish the modified article. Problem solved.