To cut a long story short
Tommi:
I believe that Wikis work so well because the world contains much more true information than than it contains false information. In fact, only a small portion of all information in the world is false. Why is this? Most of the knowledge in the world results from sciences whose goal is accumulation of knowledge that is unambiguous and can be usefully applied to something. People simply can't be bothered to churn out nonsense that leads to nowhere as much as they will generate useful knowledge.
Of course some ideologies and superstitions are full of false claims, but they contain very little actual information, either false or true. This is why they are so popular. The more information something contains, the harder it is to understand and learn. Long is more difficult than short, and something abstract that can be usefully applied in countless situations is more difficult than something concrete that applies only to few particular situations. As a side note, the relationship between the difficulty and the information content of some school subject is bit of a taboo in schools, because teachers of certain subjects would consider talking about it an attempt to diminish them.
Canonical books may be thick, but most of their content consists of sentences about particular situations in style of "Ooga Booga told Old McDonald to hit her daughter's head with a hammer, but then he changed his mind before the virtuous old man could start the pounding." The actual general content of a religion is usually very small, and it can usually be condensed to a few doctrinal sentences. Similarly the sentences of some totalitarian (that is, all-encompassing) ideology are abstract and can be applied to many situations, but their predictive power is so nonexistent that the actual information content remains small.
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