Usability Views Article Details  home | timeline | recent | popular | e-reports | userati | books | about  Art Mobs (21 Jul 2004) Why did letters work, but not pictures? Probably because the second experiment was too free-form. Ask a group of people to draw the letter "E," and most of them will envision something pretty similar. Ask them to draw a face, and they'll have a much broader array of opinions, and thus more disagreement. Truly huge artistic collaboration on the Internet seems to work only if the gang has a well-defined objective. The Wikipedia people have been discovering this themselves, after launching a project to have people collaboratively write textbooks: Wikibooks. When I spoke to Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia's founder, he noted that while some textbooks are evolving nicely, most aren't experiencing the wild success of the Wikipedia. A textbook requires a consistent sense of style and a linear structure, hallmarks of a single authorial presence. An encyclopedia doesn't Article URL: http://slate.msn.com/id/2104087/ Read 27 more articles from Slate sorted by date, popularity, or title. Next Article: Going Beyond the Web: Marketing in the Flesh     This site is a labour of love built by Chris McEvoy