A Million Penguins Can’t Write a Good Novel

The mass novel editing and writing Wiki project from Penguin Books and De Montfort University at amillionpenguins.com did not outcome in a publishable novel. That’s not really much of a surprise. Gawker reports that Penguin was initially optimistic about the project.

Before inviting the web to create a collaborative novel using a wiki in 2007, Jeremy Ettinghausen asked, “Can a community write a novel?” The reply is yes but a terrible one! A year later the Penguin publisher told researchers at De Montfort University (Penguin’s partner in the project), “It’s the best thing I’ve ever done…but I would never do it again.” Which means “The book was terrible but I’m not going to insult the 1500 public who wrote it for me.”

To be fair Penguin called the project “an experiment” in this blog post from last year.

So a couple of months ago I mentioned in that post a secret project, and now launch day is finally here! Penguin is launching its first wiki and in a project called A Million Penguins we’ve created a space where anyone can contribute to the writing of a novel and anyone can edit anyone else’s writing.

by the next six weeks we want to see whether a community can really get together, put creative differences aside (or sort them out through discussion) and produce a novel. We honestly don’t know how that is going to turn out - it’s an experiment. Some disciplines rely completely on collaboration, while

others - the writing of a novel, for example - have traditionally been the work of an individual working in isolation. But with collaboration, crowdsourcing and the ‘wisdom of the crowds’ being buzz words du jour, we thought we might as well see whether these new trends can be applied to a less obvious sphere than, say, software development.

While the project folded to create a saleable novel it did advance the notion of using wikis for writing projects. It plus provided a project that could be used to analyze social behaviors and wiki culture. You can read a complete report on the project from Bruce Mason and Sue Thomas from De Montfort University here (PDF). The report plus analyzes the work of several individual users who contributed to the wiki. They did have some issues with trolls and vandals - some citizens were banned from A Million Penguins.

A wiki can be set-up so that anyone can contribute to the wiki or edit existing subject matter on the wiki. Wikis may be useful for convinced types of collaborative writing projects but a wiki fiction left open to all web users is highly unlikely to succeed and very vulnerable to trolls. A few authors may want to use wiki technology to work on a novel or nonfiction book but it becomes an issue of too many cooks (or in that case too many penguins) when you start having dozens or hundreds of writers editing and writing the same document.
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