A Million Penguins Can't Write a Good Novel
Posted on May 22, 2008
The mass novel editing and writing Wiki project from Penguin Books and De Montfort University did not result in a publishable novel. That's not really much of a surprise. Gawker reports that Penguin was initially optimistic about the project.
Before inviting the web to create a collaborative novel using a wiki in 2007, Jeremy Ettinghausen asked, "Can a community write a novel?" The answer is yes but a terrible one! A year later the Penguin publisher told researchers at De Montfort University (Penguin's partner in the project), "It's the best thing I've ever done...but I would never do it again." Which means "The book was awful but I'm not going to insult the 1500 people who wrote it for me."To be fair Penguin called the project "an experiment" in a blog post from last year. The company said, "We honestly don't know how this is going to turn out - it's an experiment. Some disciplines rely completely on collaboration, while others - the writing of a novel, for example - have traditionally been the work of an individual working in isolation. But with collaboration, crowdsourcing and the 'wisdom of the crowds' being buzz words du jour, we thought we might as well see if these new trends can be applied to a less obvious sphere than, say, software development."
The wisdom of the crowds thing is not always so wise, especially if that wisdom comes from online trolls. While the project failed to create a saleable novel it did advance the idea of using wikis for writing projects. It also provided a project that could be used to analyze social behaviors and wiki culture. You can read a complete report on the project from Bruce Mason and Sue Thomas from De Montfort University here (PDF). The report also analyzes the work of several individual users who contributed to the wiki. They did have some issues with trolls and vandals - some people were banned from A Million Penguins.
A wiki can be set-up so that anyone can contribute to the wiki or edit existing content on the wiki. Wikis may be useful for certain types of collaborative writing projects but a wiki fiction left open to all web users is highly unlikely to succeed and very vulnerable to trolls. A few authors may want to use wiki technology to work on a novel or nonfiction book but it becomes an issue of too many cooks (or in this case too many penguins) when you start having dozens or hundreds of writers editing and writing the same document.