Blog v Wiki

Blogs and wikis have come to be known quite differently. Imagine we were arguing, I made a statement, and you said "how do you know that for sure?" Then imagine I said "I read it on a blog." You might laugh at that and the argument would continue. But imagine I said "it says it on the wiki!" You'd probably trust that. That's because you know of a well-known wiki (Wikipedia), and are aware that it is edited by literally thousands of people, and is constantly being updated to fix incorrect information. A wiki is an open source, which can be edited by a number of users, and has no distinct leader, which leads us to believe that it is not biased. On Wikipedia, it says of Wikipedia that "during the month of September 2013, Wikipedia was ranked as the 9th most popular site on the internet for desktop & mobile platforms with 116,835,000 visitors. Of these, about one out of 15,000 contribute five or more edits (you can too!), and of those, a stable 10% contribute more than 100 edits each month."

A blog, on the other hand, is edited, most often, by one person, or possibly a few friends or employees, if the password is shared. In this way a blog can be collaborative, as well as through comments, but it still has a distinct leadership. This leadership can make the information less trustworthy, if you don't know who is running the blog or don't feel that the person is intelligent. Blogs incorporate passion and a voice, which wikis most often do not, as noted in How can we measure the influence of the blogosphere?. A blog can also be very trustworthy, though, if you know and trust the person. This should be more trustworthy than Wikipedia, actually, considering what we read in Wikipedia Looks Hard at Its Culture. It is noted through quotes by Jimmy Wales that Wikipedia contributors are "more than 80 percent male, more than 65 percent single, more than 85 percent without children, around 70 percent under the age of 30." Wikipedia, though a public project, is skewed, and meanwhile is viewed as factual information. Over the years, Wikipedia has placed more weight on male issues and male history, provided primarily through the male perspective.  An acquaintance of mine actually hosts events where technically inclined women spend hours editing Wikipedia with women's history. Wiki can be seen as a project in this way- bringing together people who are not often given equality of attention to transform information for a better, truer, representative result. It can be used for peaceful revolution.