# a million penguins author: 662 unique contributors country: united kingdom genre: collaborative fiction hypertext fiction electronic literature publisher: penguin books and de montfort university publication date: 2007 media type: wiki website: amillionpenguins.com (archived on 3 february 2007) a million penguins was a naff / experimental collaborative fiction framed as a "wiki-novel." it was launched in 2007 by penguin books in collaboration with kate pullinger on behalf of the institute of creative technologies at de montfort university inspired by the success of wikipedia # 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 though both seem hardly surprising nowadays the story ran on an installation of mediawiki 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. despite having 1-476 registered users only a small portion contributed to editing the site and of that small portion just two users contributed to over 25% of the edits. 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 ir 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 nor 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." those who reference the project positively note that the project turned into something that was more of a social experiment rather than one of literature since the contributions were from a diverse mix of people (which is an odd way to view things) in april 2008 the institute of creative technologies of de montfort university 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" // republic of bob