Selfless Wikis Versus Selfish Blogs

Should you put your content on a community Wiki, or a personal Blog?

Firstly, there's the question, where does it belong? Is your content an opinion, or is it a neutral-point-of-view statement of facts? If its an opinion, it only belongs on a blog. Wikis must remain neutral, and without opinions or judgments of any kind. Justin Kestelyn -- the Senior Director of Oracle Technology Network -- explains it much better than I could:

A wiki is not the place for opinion, because opinion does not invite editing, only response.

Zing! Pow! That sums it up in one sentence... Blogs are the place for opinion, responses take the form of comments or trackbacks. Wikis, on the other hand, are begging for editing and collaboration. Thus, you need to be okay with people totally rewriting your wiki content. If you have an emotional attachment to what you wrote, and think its perfect as-is, then you had better blog it...

Another question is this: do you ever want credit for what you wrote? If so, it probably does not belong on a wiki. I asked a while back why do you edit wikipedia? Most of my readers cite ideology or fun as the main motivators. People rarely edit wikis for selfish reasons... why?

Brand recognition, that's why. If you want to make a name for yourself as an expert, you need to put all those great tips, tricks, and essays on a blog. Blogging is a selfish act, because it ensures you get credit for your rants. Naturally, very few blog posts have the quality of a wiki... although blog material is fresher, more dynamic, and usually more controversial. Some of this harks back to the opinion versus fact debate... but some of it might be because people are willing to work harder on a blog because they get credit.

So what if your content falls into both categories? That would mean you have this:

1. A great observation/essay/tip on your blog, that is 100% wiki quality,
2. You'd like to share it so that it continues to be a better article, but
3. you'd like some credit for your work to foster your "brand"

Should the wiki just be a re-iteration of your blog post, with a link back to it? What if the article changes so much that it no longer represents your work? Should you still get credit?

I'm not sure if anybody has solved the problem of giving wiki editors sufficient credit... the closest I've ever seen is the DJango Book Project. They aspired to write a book about the DJango framework, but invited people to criticize and comment inline. Sort of like Microsoft TrackChanges on steroids. Or, you could use something like Subversion's blame feature for wiki markup...

The goal is to entice the selfish to contribute to wikis... I can feel that we're close to a solution here. I'm going to noodle on this for a while, but I won't be upset if somebody beats me to the punch.