Wikis

Wikis are community spaces that allow anyone (depending on the wikis settings) to edit the websites content. This allows for one of wikis biggest drawcards, the ability for a site to be updated and maintained almost exclusively by its user's. Anyone with a Hobby loves talking with others about it. Wikis allow you to share information about things with other and create pages that can be constantly be updated and maintained.

The ability to maintain pages is good for things like tutorials. For instance if I had created a tutorial for how to use RSS feeds with Google Reader and Google changed a piece of its service so the tutorial was no longer correct I or another of the wikis users could correct this error. Not only this if a strong community is developed then it will start to develop its on material for the wiki independant of the creator.

All of this can be seen with wikipedia, most of the sites content is created, maintaned and edited. People create content for the things they are interested in, then someone else may edit the page to correct any inaccuracies and finally the community will work to keep the page up to date. The best wikis are ones with a strong community of people who are dedicated to it and willing to spend some time adding to and maintaing it.