collaborative fiction
Collaborative fiction is a form of writing by a group of authors who share creative control of a story.
Collaborative fiction can occur for commercial gain, as part of education, or recreationally – many collaboratively written works have bee ...
framed as a "wiki-novel". It was launched in 2007 by
Penguin Books
Penguin Books is a British publishing house. It was co-founded in 1935 by Allen Lane with his brothers Richard and John, as a line of the publishers The Bodley Head, only becoming a separate company the following year.Kate Pullinger on behalf of the Institute of Creative Technologies at
De Montfort University
De Montfort University Leicester (DMU) is a public university in the city of Leicester, England. It was established in accordance with the Further and Higher Education Act in 1992 as a degree awarding body. The name De Montfort University was tak ...
, inspired by the success of
Wikipedia
Wikipedia is a multilingual free online encyclopedia written and maintained by a community of volunteers, known as Wikipedians, through open collaboration and using a wiki-based editing system. Wikipedia is the largest and most-read refer ...
.
About the project
As the first collaborative web fiction to be sponsored by a large mainstream publisher, the project received a lot of attention. The site quickly became a target for vandalism, and no cohesive plot or narrative developed.
The story ran on an installation of
MediaWiki
MediaWiki is a free and open-source wiki software. It is used on Wikipedia and almost all other Wikimedia websites, including Wiktionary, Wikimedia Commons and Wikidata; these sites define a large part of the requirement set for MediaWi ...
and could be contributed to by any site visitor, although a team of students at the university moderated contributions, in an attempt to keep the project on-track. Due to the site receiving more than 100 edits every hour, Penguin imposed "reading windows" that froze the novel so that editors could read over what had been changed to get their bearings on where the story was going.
On March 7, 2007, the Penguin Books UK blog announced that the project had come to an end.
Reception
Although some commentators expressing interest in seeing how the project took shape, including the potential educational benefits others described its progress as "predictably horrible". The final report on the project notes that the project neither produced a cohesive narrative or a community: "The contributors did not form a community, rather they spontaneously organised themselves into a diverse, riotous assembly."
Subsequent scholarship on collaborative fiction frequently references the project, though often as a warning. Paul Rower writes that the "result was deemed a failure because of the many un-integrated elements", while Anne Cong-Huyen calls it "ambitious but incomprehensible". Writing for the Institute for the Future of the Book, Ben Vershbow questioned why Penguin would choose the wiki as a form: "they chose the form that is probably most resistant to these new social forms of creativity".
In April 2008, the Institute of Creative Technologies of
De Montfort University
De Montfort University Leicester (DMU) is a public university in the city of Leicester, England. It was established in accordance with the Further and Higher Education Act in 1992 as a degree awarding body. The name De Montfort University was tak ...
published ''A Million Penguins Research Report'', which concluded: "We have demonstrated that the wiki novel experiment was the wrong way to try to answer the question of whether a community could write a novel, but as an adventure in exploring new forms of publishing, authoring and collaboration it was, ground-breaking and exciting."