The growth of the blog and wiki phenomenon draws some potentially unhealthy parallels to email – a system that is plagued relentlessly by spam and, in many instances, can actually reduce productivity and effectiveness rather than enhance it.

The central issue with blogs and wikis is trust. Here we have systems that are inherently long on information but short on attribution and verification. Unfortunately, the innate gullibility of society which helped fuel the email spam deluge to epidemic proportions is very likely to do the same in systems that lack checks and balances and also rely too heavily on the goodwill of volunteers to maintain order, without a defined reward structure.