On Tim Bray's blog there's a follow-up to yesterday's News.com story about the Pie/Echo/Atom project ("Battle of the Blog"). Tim talks about the reporter's attempt to get him to focus on the personality politics in the story--and Sam Ruby reports a similar conversation in his blog. Tim goes on, however, to say the following:

You can't understand the real story--ever--without understanding the personalities and who said what to whom and when and why. Marxism had an alternate theory of history: that it was all predetermined by socio-economic forces and that the individual was not a factor in the story. There's a word for that theory: wrong.

Contrast that with Clay's posting here last month on the topic of the project wiki:

But there is a second reason, under the surface but possibly more important -- wikis denature personality. Echo exists not because there are things wrong with the RSS markup -- there are, but they could be easily fixed. Echo exists because there are things wrong with the RSS process. RSS is having not a technological crisis but a constitutional one, where who decides what concerning RSS is not clear, and will never be clear, because the people doing the deciding don't even see themselves as being part of a decision making body.

Are there times when "denaturing personality" is useful? Sure. But Tim's points bring out for me where my greatest discomfort with wikis come from. I believe it matters who said what, and when. That context provides enormous "metadata" for me personally. And the wiki explicitly strips that. I understand why, and I do recognize its benefits. But I'm still uncomfortable with it.