Collective Creativity
Penguin UK's A Million Penguins is an experiment in creative writing and community. Anyone can write. Anyone can edit. It's a first-of-a-kind experiment in creative writing and collaboration based on the wiki principle.
There have already been a variety of experiments in this direction. With the 2003 publication of Quicksilver, Neal Stephenson created the Metaweb, a wiki where readers collaboratively annotated the ideas and historical period explored in the novel. Cyberlaw scholar Lawrence Lessig drew upon the knowledge of the community by using a public wiki to update and revise his seminal book, Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace. Lessig committed the royalties from the resulting book, Code v.2, to the nonprofit Creative Commons. Code v.2 (free download here) has now been ported to a SocialText wiki, where readers are invited to make corrections or add material to the current book.
Can a million penguins sitting at a million keyboards together write a novel? The bananapolisation (see infinite monkey theorem) of A Million Penguins has created some controversy, but the students from De Montfort's Creative Writing and New Media course, who act as moderators of the wiki, have kept the spam and vandalism to a minimum.
The bigger question, though, is whether or not the concept of a "wiki-novel" is an oxymoron. After all, novels and wikis seem to be at opposite ends of the collaborative spectrum. Or is A Million Penguins an example of an emergent, net-native literary form? The discussion could turn out to be more interesting than the novel itself. It's worth following.
There have already been a variety of experiments in this direction. With the 2003 publication of Quicksilver, Neal Stephenson created the Metaweb, a wiki where readers collaboratively annotated the ideas and historical period explored in the novel. Cyberlaw scholar Lawrence Lessig drew upon the knowledge of the community by using a public wiki to update and revise his seminal book, Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace. Lessig committed the royalties from the resulting book, Code v.2, to the nonprofit Creative Commons. Code v.2 (free download here) has now been ported to a SocialText wiki, where readers are invited to make corrections or add material to the current book.
Can a million penguins sitting at a million keyboards together write a novel? The bananapolisation (see infinite monkey theorem) of A Million Penguins has created some controversy, but the students from De Montfort's Creative Writing and New Media course, who act as moderators of the wiki, have kept the spam and vandalism to a minimum.
The bigger question, though, is whether or not the concept of a "wiki-novel" is an oxymoron. After all, novels and wikis seem to be at opposite ends of the collaborative spectrum. Or is A Million Penguins an example of an emergent, net-native literary form? The discussion could turn out to be more interesting than the novel itself. It's worth following.
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