AbstractThe culture of electronic text differs from that of book publishing and the traditional roles of the publisher, editor and reader are becoming irrevocably intertwined. One reason for this is the emergence of collaborative software like weblogs and, in particular, the "wiki". Wiki comes from the Hawaiian word for "quick" and is a relatively unstructured medium for distributing information. A wiki is made up of various hyperlinked documents that can be collectively edited using a browser. In the words of Bill Walsh, "In the old days people had only (professionally edited) newspapers, magazines and books from which to take their usage cues. In the Internet world everyone's a publisher [...] But if everyone's a publisher, can everyone afford an editor?" ("Lapsing into a Comma", Contemporary Books, 2000). This essay examines the arguments for and against the use of the wiki as a disseminator of knowledge. Questions will be asked about the accuracy of that knowledge and the societal impact of collaborative software. The key argument will explore if, with reference to the above issues, the role of the publisher as gatekeeper is really being undermined. The Traditional Role of PublishingThe rise of a print-dominated society in Europe began in earnest in the 13th century with a shift away from the Church's monopoly of information that existed during the manuscript book period. This was initially fuelled by the brave efforts of Wycliffe, Luther and Tyndale whose hard work and sacrifices led to ordinary people being able to enjoy the word of God through ownership of their own copies of the Bible and in a language other than Latin. In combination with reproductions of other classic texts of antiquity and, later, with scientific advances, these factors led to the development of books as elements of propaganda and religious education. During the Middle Ages there were many social, political and economic changes that made print important. But it could be argued that those changes might not have happened as quickly, or perhaps at all, without the availability of print. In the mid 15th century, things begin to change further with the advent of the printing press. The technology of the printing press - which is mainly attributed to Gutenberg with his idea for moveable type - coupled with new political and economic situations led to the expansion of a European-dominated world economy and the beginning of a system of international competition in the book trade. At a time when most ordinary people were illiterate, they still had access to book culture because there were travelling raconteurs who stood in the market and read from books as a means of making a living as entertainers. But it was the rich and educated who controlled society and dictated the kind of information suitable for the masses; the elite were the publishers. Since then, publishing has held an important place in establishing and defining notion of "mass culture". It has helped nurture a sense of national identity and has stimulated intellectual and artistic thought. The traditional publisher is seen as an objective "gatekeeper" with the vital role of choosing and distributing books of "cultural significance", and has been instrumental in building a literary heritage that can be enjoyed by all. But during the 20th century, and with the rise of the Internet, the publishing industry became widely criticised for its part in promoting elitism in book culture and thereby helping to reinforce divisions in both gender and class. The Cultural Impact of the InternetThe World Wide Web is the most collaborative multi-cultural project in the history of mankind. Millions of people have contributed personal homepages, weblogs (blogs), wiki pages and other sites to the growing body of human expression available online. Jay David Bolter and Richard Lanham maintain that the Internet is inherently a democratic medium. Its users have the freedom to express their thoughts and ideas, and have gained more power in getting access to information. The Internet is a web of networks and censorship and control of information is difficult. The traditional face of the publisher and author is now changing. Bolter stated that "As long as the printed book remains the primary medium of literature, traditional views of the author as authority and of literature as monument will remain convincing for most readers. The electronic medium, however, threatens to bring down the whole edifice at once. It complicates our understanding of literature as either mimesis or expression, it denies the fixity of the text, and it questions the authority of the author." Information in book form assumes some sort of narrative in a linear structure with a beginning, middle and end. In a book, footnotes, indices and other forms of non-sequential writing are irritating to refer to and distract the reader. Electronic text (or hypertext) on the Internet can be read in many ways, enabling writers to interconnect events in a non-sequential way, without there being any obvious start or finish point. All knowledge is presented as having equal status. As Landow puts it, "hypertext is the perfect medium for expressing the postmodern cultural/literary theory." Weblogs and the Individual as PublisherBefore "blogging" became popular, digital communities took many forms. These included Usenet, e-mail lists and bulletin boards. In the 1990s, Internet forum software such as WebX created running conversations with threads. Blogging combines a personal Web page with tools, specifically blogrolls and TrackBacks, to make linking to other pages easier - A blogroll is a collection of links to other weblogs, whileTrackBack is a system implemented by many blogging tools, including Movable Type and WordPress, which allow a blogger to check who has seen the original post and who has written another entry concerning it - The system works by providing an alert between blogs. This way, instead of there being more than one person in control of threads on a forum, or having anyone able to start threads on a list, there is a moderating effect that is the personality of the weblog's owner. More recently, this moderation extended to a court ruling ordering three bloggers to reveal their sources behind advance product information published in two online publications. See  URL  The term "weblog" was coined by Jorn Barger in December 1997. The shorter version, "blog," was coined by Peter Merholz, who, in 1999, broke the word weblog into the phrase "we blog" in the sidebar of his weblog ( URL ). In 2003, the Oxford English Dictionary included the terms "weblog", "weblogging" and "weblogger" in its new edition ( URL ). Wikis and Collaborative PublishingSven Birkerts in his book The Gutenberg Elegies regards hypertext as a means by which all knowledge is offered as a "souped-up cognitive collage". He could have been talking about the wiki. Wikis improve collaboration via a shared workspace. This shared workspace is essentially a hyperlinked blackboard that can be accessed and changed using the same simple browser-based user interface. The idea behind wikis is to make them as easy to write as they are to read. Any user who looks at any page on a wiki Web site can easily change it, remove it, link from it or link to it. This ease of use and conceptual simplicity can encourage user contributions and lead to significantly more knowledge sharing and more intense collaboration, which ultimately, it is thought, will foster creativity and innovation. Four properties define a wiki-style collaboration. Users can make changes Wikis, by default, make writing, structuring and styling capabilities available to all users. "Edit this page" links appear on every page, which encourage users to make changes. The ability to easily track who made what changes and to refer back to previous versions balances out the lack of explicit control. Simple markup for formatting and linking New content can be added using browser forms (typically in plain text), which are formatted using a simple markup language. Easily remembered names - usually the page title - are used to create clickable links between any two pages. The user works only with the intuitive logical structure of the Web site (that is, the same structure that is used for navigation) without any need to understand how content is stored. Visible change histories Previous versions of changed content are available as links on each page, along with timestamps and details of who made the change. And "diff'ing" tools can used to display and color-code the differences between any two versions. Users can set up e-mail notifications or Really Simple Syndication (RSS) feeds to alert them to changes. The visible change trails that accompany all activity add transparency. They also incorporate a roll-back capability so that erroneous changes can be removed. This is essential in limiting the amount of damage that less-sophisticated, non co-operative or malicious contributors can inflict. For an example of this see  URL  This link provides a very interesting eight-minute look at how a Wikipedia entry gets built and built again (just click on the "history" button to view). But it also shows how easily the system can be abused. Please be aware that some of this content is of an adult nature. Built-in, dynamic, Web site functionality A wiki's main role is in rendering text markup into HTML (Hypertext Markup Language), maintaining links and keeping revision histories. But wiki engines typically include a number of other dynamic Web site features including full text search; automatic navigation links; design templates; PDF (Portable Document Format) or RSS export; per-page discussion functionality; basic analytics, such as most visited, most changed, recently updated or referenced by; personalization, based on user preferences; and add-ons such as blogging tools and event calendars. Wikis are simple enough to be used with little training or administrative support. Contributors are encouraged to "publish" as early as possible. And their peers can fix any errors that contributors may make, without having to ask permission first. Wikis are significant because they bring together authorial, collaborative and administrative functionality, simplify it, and make it a natural part of the navigational and reading experience for any end user who cares to use it. This encourages passive readers to become active contributors by leaving comments, making changes and even reorganizing or streamlining the site. The wiki concept was originally developed by Ward Cunningham in 1995. Since then, dozens of wiki implementations have been promoted, including a number of open-source projects like OpenWiki ( URL ) and Kwiki ( URL ). Wikipedia ( URL  ) is one of the largest voluntary efforts in distributed authorship. It was founded in 2001 by Larry Sanger and Jimmy Wales. As of December 2004, there were 13,000 active contributors working on over 1,300,000 articles in more than 100 languages. Wikipedia articles tend to be neutral in tone, and when the topic is controversial the varying viewpoints are explained in addition to offering the basic facts. When anyone can edit what you've just posted, such fairness becomes essential. But these different viewpoints are not necessarily authoritative. Wikis Are One Step Up From BlogsA lot of the value of a blog network is the social hub that is built from relationships. People read each others' blogs to see what their friends and acquaintances are up to, and then they add value by linking, commenting and elaborating on what has already been posted. Similar social interactions take place in wikis, but at a faster pace and with a more intensely collaborative feel. "Wikis are based on emergent intelligence and knowledge: the belief that the best results come from allowing decisions to emerge bottom-up, in a relatively free-form interchange between the participants of a group, with only a light-handed editorial or managerial top-down control being applied" ( URL ). Because so few restrictions are placed on participants, members of a project group may feel they have to exercise some form of censorship. This could take the form of building up some of the minimalist forms of wiki components, correcting the grammar and syntax of other contributors' articles, or persuading others to accept your viewpoints. This interaction between contributors, united in a shared idea, helps build important social ties. Jay David Bolter in Writing Space talks about the "interactive relationship" between the author and the reader. With Wikipedia, for example, different texts from different genres can be interlinked with a contributor's own work to present an entirely new offering, and thereby merging the usual barriers between author and reader. "Boundaries between culture producer and cultural consumer break down." Analysis of the Impact of Collaborative PublishingOne of the most serious concerns about collaborative authorship is whether or not the content can be trusted. In the absence of a publishing gatekeeper, an anonymous group author is unlikely to have the same clout as a renowned single author. If a writer is perceived by the reader to be an authority on a subject, then the information that the writer gives out is almost always seen as content that can be relied upon. Wikimedia ( URL ), the non-profit organisation that initiated Wikipedia and other associated sites, addresses these concerns by offering a model for peer review of any collaborative authorship. All articles submitted to Wikipedia undergo peer review and any amendments are saved and linked. It is thought that, eventually, this constant editing will allow readers to trust the content. The intention of the Wikimedia organisation is to create a neutral territory where, through open debate, agreements can be made on even the most contentious of topics. The Wikimedia authoring system sets up a democratic round-table where "contributors construct their own rulespace and policies emerge from consensus-based, rather than top-down processes" ( URL ). Therefore the authority of Wikimedia's collaborative offering depends partly on a communal "self-policing" principle that is defined and imposed by group members. As Wikipedia co-founder, Jimmy Wales, puts it, "The incentive for behaviour in a wiki is to write in such a way that your writing can survive. The only way it can survive is if your writing is acceptable to an extremely wide audience." ( URL ) The collaborative authoring environment created by the Web will make even more ambitious and far-reaching projects possible. Projects like the Semantic Web, which aims to make all content searchable by allowing users to assign semantic meaning to their work, are set to organize the phenomenal output of collaborative networks. Possible Consequences of the Loss of the GatekeeperIn traditional publishing, authors of the printed word can dictate how their books are structured and therefore can establish, to a great extent, how those books are read. In turn, the publisher is able to exercise control over the form of the final published work. Bolter sees hypertext as being basically unstable and its ability to interconnect different Web sites into one long link indicates a shift in power from author to reader. He maintains that electronic text offers the reader the possibility of controlling their own path through a text, without intervention from the author. In this way, the authority of the writer is undermined. Wikis, and other forms of collaborative authorship, empower the reader and are seen as responsible for challenging the long-standing literary norm. "The process of gatekeeping, which is so integral to publishing, has been challenged by postmodern thought. If there are no absolute standards, no rights or wrongs, no absolute good or bad, then the role of the publisher is defunct and redundant." ( URL  publishing/culture). The Internet, as a collaboratively authored "book" offers opportunities for publishing without a gatekeeper. Information is no longer censored or judged according to its value, and there are few, if any, restrictions on who can access what. Electronic text is also very hard for author or publisher to control. It is easy to change, both textually and typographically. Because electronic text can be so easily altered, copyright infringements on the Internet are widespread and cases of piracy are very hard to pin down. Copyright is the legal means of protecting expression and it underpins the practice of publishing and authorship. But the rights of authors and publishers, established through many years of copyright legislation, are in danger of being diluted by the activities of collaborative publishing. Richard Lanham states in his book The Digital Word "Copyright law is a creation of print. The electronic word does not fit into the existing copyright marketplace". ConclusionIn the world of the wiki, the superior standings of the author and publisher are demoted to the level of the general reader. No longer is the publisher seen as a cultural authority. To traditionalists, the publishing process is "democratised", and the role of publisher as gatekeeper is rendered outmoded. While it is certainly true that the Internet has largely done away with the traditional role of the gatekeeper as most of us know it, the reality is that the culture of publishing and the gatekeeping role is alive and well. When new software made it easier for everyone to create their own Web sites or to take part in online discussion groups there was a huge rush to "be published". Getting your name on the World Wide Web was all that mattered and censorship became a matter of some irrelevance. Who cared whether the spelling and grammar wasn't quite right? People were more concerned about disseminating information to anyone who bothered to hit their home page. However, the advent of the wiki has gone some way to halting this stream of unauthorised information. We've already examined the physical properties of the wiki in terms of its functionality, and its editing, formatting and linking capabilities. We know what it can offer the user. It's already been said that any user can make any number of changes to any article submitted to a wiki site and that many of these changes may not be authoritative. But human nature is such that, if a mistake crops up on a wiki, someone will invariably spot the error. Armed with the ability to use the editing software that comes with the wiki, pedants can correct the mistake almost immediately it's noticed. With the printed word, a similar mistake might be found, but the reader has no power to correct it. If the publisher notices the mistake, they have to wait until the book is about to be republished to alter any erroneous text. What's unique about wikis is that they are vehicles for reaching any number of unofficial "authorities" on a subject and that all of these contributors can have the chance to disseminate their knowledge to the masses. With the Wikipedia, for example, there is a hard core of about a hundred "Wikipedians" that spend all their waking hours submitting articles or editing existing ones. To them, the wiki has become a way of life (see  URL ). But despite its breadth of coverage, Wikipedia, one of the best examples of a collaborative project with some semblance of authority, cannot guarantee that every one of its articles meets any standard for accuracy. Wikis are still some way off from convincing the likes of Bill Walsh that the role of the gatekeeper in collaborative publishing is defunct. In his book, Lapsing into a Comma, he maintains, "Internet discourse is unfiltered, and in losing the filter that blocks material without mass appeal, we also lose the filters that separate fact from fiction and standard from substandard language. The power of the usage police has been significantly diluted." (3,012) 