I wish I had the nerve to talk like this to the newsdesk:
If you’ve ever tried submitting anything to the Internet Movie Database, you may recognise this tone. IMDb is a wiki – that is, an aggregation of user contributions – but it has achieved the status of a semi-official reference tool at the Tribune, much more so than Wikipedia ever will. And I think that may be because of its fearsome army of robot editors, which intercept and scan everything you submit, and more often than not sling it back like Jason Robards growling “You haven’t got it” to Redford and Hoffman.
No diffident pencilled queries in the margin for IMDb: for example, if you have a couple of pieces of casting information you want to add to a TV show, you’d better have chapter and verse to hand.
So you say this person was in the show? Here are a list of actors with similar names: it’s easy to get confused. If you’re uncertain, click here and we’ll sort it out for you. Or perhaps you’d just like to give up the whole idea? Choose an option, please. (And by the way, you formatted the request wrongly. It has already been corrected: this is merely a notification.)
That’s the spirit. And if you submit anything as ambitious as a three-line episode summary, you get pulled apart like a rookie screenwriter at a pitch meeting:
There are misspellings. You have written too much: if you insist on overfiling, we will simply move your piece to a different slot inside the site (delicious). And, my favourite bit of all:
“The following fixes have been applied automatically: ‘…’ has been replaced with ‘.’ in accordance with IMDb rules.”
No judicious exceptions, no stretching a point. Ellipses are just banned, rather like the way all semicolons were excised for some years on the Tribune’s sport section. It’s a rule. And I suspect that “surveilling”, even if spelt correctly, will turn out to be “not in the dictionary”. I’ll just change it now. They won’t like it.
For the first time in my life, I feel like a writer.
Ten minutes past deadline 
In the spirit of the piece I have to take issue with your definition of a wiki. It is indeed an aggregation of user contributions but the point is that the content can be *modified directly* by users, whether or not they contributed it in the first place. (So by way of contrast, YouTube is an aggregation of user contributions but is not a wiki.)
Ooh good point. On that subject, if it can be modified, but ‘indirectly’, as it were – eg through an automated editing process – is that still a wiki? Or to be a wiki, does the content have to be genuinely directly editable without interference?
I’m not sure where the definition (if there is one) stands at the moment, but there will always be some degree of machine intervention to check that you haven’t entered any weird characters and so on that might break things. (As the Web has grown more diverse this has had to extend to checking for people linking to malware and pictures of cocks.) Some sites might go further and check for profanity, for example; in this case IMDb is parsing names, spelling and length.
I think the important thing is that the machine is not (we assume) taking a view on what you’ve written, and that is the central idea of the wiki – it’s the hive mind in action, so that you can put something out there and it will be corrected or expanded by someone else after the fact. What you’re not doing is emailing the webmaster out of band, asking him to make a change to his content and then being subject to his own whims (or time constraints or whatever else).
The original wiki was at c2.com and you can read a bit there about how it got started: http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?WikiHistory