After our presentation, someone (I can’t remember who!) asked the question “I’m starting a project, which should I use: A blog or a wiki?”
The questions kind of took me aback, and I’m afraid I answered rather ineptly. To me, the difference are pretty clear, but I couldn’t, on the spur of the moment, articulate that into a soundbite. After thinking about it for several weeks, I think I have a bit of an answer:
Use a wiki if you need to create information collaboratively. Use a blog if you only need to disseminate it.
This question is something I am considering doing a poster presentation on- mostly because I think I can come up with some nice visuals to go with it. I was thinking a mindmap looking thing that shows the structure of a blog opposed to the amorphous quality of a wiki.
Oh, man – this is the kind of thing I love to think about. To some extent, the question seems similar to, “I want to build a thing, which should I use: A hammer or a screwdriver?”
I think you hit it on the head: A wiki provides organizational latitude that a blog doesn’t, which is clear when it is considered that some blogs are implemented on top of wiki infrastructure.
Blogs are typically linear, stack-like,
and linked to external resources, while wikis are more densely linked internally, and more graph-like in structure.
In a blog, the information presented is organized chronologically, though the imposition of categories and search provide alternate, possibly dynamic organizations. The organization of information in a wiki is much more dependent on the semantic content information presented. On the other hand, wiki pages mutate over time, while blog entries tend to be relatively static.
A blog can be collaborative, with many authors (e.g. Boing Boing), comments, etc. A wiki can be restricted to having a single editor.
I would use a blog for reporting events, making announcements, a diary.
I would use a wiki for documentation, “information with an emergent structure” (that is, a bunch of related stuff I’m not sure how to organize), an encyclopedia, a quick-and-dirty content managment system (like the Hartley Neighborhood Association site).
I get this question a lot as well. The best way I can think of to explain it is to say something along the lines that a wiki is for “book-like” content and a blog is for “newspaper-like” content. That seems to get the big idea through so more of the details could be talked about in a proper context. The analogies may not be the most accurate, but I find it sets the table in a good way.