Why wikis may not work for you or me

My attempts to use wikis, personally (as part of my self-imposed regime to learn about new tools) and with pupils, has convinced me that Many2Many is spot on: wikis are strangely hard work and require the teacher to invest heavily in leading pupils to understand how to use them — and such heavy guidance quickly becomes heavy-handedness, killing the very collaborative spontaneity wikis so clearly can release.

The comments at Many2Many are themselves interesting: 'A few things which are going wrong: wikis have gotten *hard*. This goes against the very concept of a wiki, and yet to use a system like MoinMoin, or Twiki requires learning'; 'I'm not sure what you should expect from them when people *don't* have a lot of information that needs collating'.