Dear Peter and Stewart, >I don't understand what you are getting at - tasks can be delegated in writing with a quill on parchment, you don't need a digital medium in order to keep control over input on a collaborative project. I will give a quick answer without too much thought. For better or worse my comments are partly based on the dual experience of keeping a website of my own, and being a wiki editor over many years (on big and small wikis), so it is one of those moments where you have to try to convert what you believe from experience into an explanation for people who have not necessarily experienced the same thing. First of all, and perhaps most obviously, a wiki is live and can have any number of editors working live. There is no uploading step, and no needing to contact the administrator to keep working on something, and no confusions about what the latest version of a particular text is in your e-mails. If you have more than about 1 editor, this can be life saving. Coming back from a weekend away need not make everything impossible. Connected to this, when your website has many articles, certain types of change become very difficult to do at a certain point because of a cascade effect: if you change the link where something is, every other page will be wrong. You need to be constantly reminding yourself about it, which makes editing slower. You can of course try to set yourself a policy to stick to, but then you can basically never again change. The ability to set up editing rights is a particular concern, I feel, in discussions about a quality wiki. The tendency in these discussions, the way I read it, is to fear having even a handful of editors. It would just get out of control. With a wiki you can set-up policies, and go away for the week without needing to fear destruction of the wiki. Writing text in a wiki of course takes the same time as in any other editing software. The short cuts during editing come in various ways: templates and various forms of pre-saved work that can be used often are one way. Some wikis keep their Bibliography in one place and create templates that allow short references to them. Others do this within one article, allowing, if you prefer it, things like Harvard referencing (Smith 2001, p.1 would link to a place telling you what Smith 2001 is for example). Something I like, but which wikitree deliberately removed from the standard wiki software, are "talk pages" which record past discussions about what an article should say. I think this is important for any complicated subject. Whereas you say that hypertext writing is easy, and I think I know what you mean, it is easier in a wiki. In the editing box, a link to another wiki article simply need double square brackets around that term to become a link. There is more that could be discussed. The way that category setting in wikis helps to structure all the work, helping editors to all be able to jump in quickly without thinking too hard about where and how, and helping readers get to the right place, is hard to explain quickly for example. It can allow the wiki some flexibility in what it covers also, such as having articles of different types (some on people, some on manors for example). Regards Andrew