Ah, the wiki. The epitome of Web 2.0. A website you can alter at will! Ultimate collaboration! True interactivity!
Feh.
Call me an elitist, but personally I believe that knowledge needs gatekeepers. Auctoritas is not something we should scoff at. We should definitely value the contributions of experts over the contributions of Joe the Blogger.
I'm not saying amateurs don't have valuable insights, or that all experts are necessarily right and should never be questioned. Not at all. "Question everything" is an excellent motto, in fact. The problem with an unregulated wiki environment, though, is that the wiki itself cannot question anything, while lending legitimacy to all its contents equally. I have mentioned before how much that bothers me, so I won't belabor the point further in this post.
Having said all that, I do think that a moderated wiki is a fantastically useful tool for gathering many ideas together in one place and creating a font of mutually-acquired wisdom. My gaming and other geeky interests generate a host of group wikis, and these can be quite useful sources of information, so long as someone with some sense keeps a firm hand on the tiller, so to speak.
For education, then, wikis can be a great way to create whole-class projects and get every student to engage. The sample AP World History wiki looked like a great example of that sort of usage, and in education a wiki has a natural gatekeeper built right in: the teacher. So as long as the teacher him- or herself has some sense and is willing to exercise a little editorial control, maybe educational wikis needn't necessarily be wack. ;)
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