As you may or may not know, I spent quite a bit of time helping to build SRP's Wiki. A friend of mine just notified me of an interesting trend there. Or, rather, a sad one. There have been no changes for weeks. While I was still an active contributor, there was a lot of discussion whether a Wiki was the right format for a knowledge database. Here are some of the arguments:

1. The information on SRP (or any other shaving forum, but SRP was the source from which we drew the most information, simply because we believed it to be the most accurate) is freely available. The other forums either completely lack a copyright notice, or it is a standard one that allows for free redistribution for non-commercial purposes. We made sure that these IP rights were protected. Incidentally, this should have made the Wiki even more popular, because the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States under which we put it should have been an incentive for anyone wanting to enhance, or copy, its contents. Not so. If you want my honest opinion, the "non commercial" bit killed that, but that is as it should be.
2. We decided to gather, aggregate, analyse, and refine its contents. One outspoken critic thought this was wrong. His argument was, 'the real story is in the forum threads.' I kid you not. In his defence, it should be noted that he does not use Wikipedia (for reasons to which I shall come in a second). But seriously, since this critic had a lot of clout, we were forced to either bloat the articles with unnecessary tidbits, or link to threads in which he, more often than not, was the most vocal proponent of a single school of thought.
3. Then there was the argument of, 'but anyone can edit it !!!!!!!'. Why, yes. This is how crowd intelligence works. It never ceased to amaze me how one single person could believe to know more than a largish crowd of dedicated researchers and editors. But believe you me, it took a lot of fun out of contributing to the Wiki.
4. It is hard to use. That depends. We not only wrote articles like the one explaining to write or edit a Wiki article, we also installed an editor that was easier to use than the average forum editor. Still, people refused to amend or enhance the Wiki. Coming back to crowd intelligence, it is tempting to speculate whether there is also crowd obtuseness.
5. Last, there was the funniest (in my opinion) argument: 'library are boring, forums is fun' [sic!]. I should say that depends. If your goal is to answer the same questions over and over again, it certainly is. If you want to force people to dig through endless threads - often with utterly meaningless subject lines - to maybe find an answer to their question, it most certainly is. And if you want to put yourself on a pedestal called 'poster with most articles', it absolutely is. That, however, was never my intention. When I joined the straight shaving community, there was virtually nothing. I was willing to read and learn, but there was just too much information, most of it ranging from not-so-good to completely useless. SRP's Wiki has changed that. Quite dramatically. It has become the prime source for straight shaving related information, and it makes me slightly proud to have been part of a team that shaped it.

Why the almost complete standstill now? Because the critic above was wrong on all accounts. The Wiki is almost feature complete. You can even download entire parts of it as nice, printable books (hardly anyone uses this feature, the reasons for which escape me, though). Said friend still has 'complete overhaul of honing section' on his todo list, but even that does not change the fact that it really is good. If you do not believe me, give The SRP Wiki a go. Lots of good information, and as objective and free of commerce as we could make it. As I said, it was tremendous fun building it, and I hope someone plucks up some courage, and develops the drive necessary to enhance it.