A Million Penguins (2007)

“A Million Penguins” is a wiki-novel project launched in 2007 by Penguin Books and De Montfort University in collaboration with a group of MA students that Kate Pullinger led with Prof Sue Thomas. The project asked the question ‘Can a community write a novel?’ Pullinger described the project as ‘chaotic and exhausting but also exciting.’

The collaborative novel project was open to anyone with access to the internet who wanted to help write it and was created on MediaWiki. A team from De Montfort University, including students from the Online Master of Arts in Creative Writing and New Media program, coordinated it. The project was alive for 5 weeks in February-March 2007 and nearly 1500 people contributed.

Douglas Rushkoff characterised the project as follows:: “>>A Million Penguins<< looks like fun, but it's still likely to remain more a million penguins than a cohesive or coherent bird”. Pullinger used the experience of “A Million Penguins” in her future participatory writing projects, making them more coherent and community-based, with clearer roles and guidelines. “A Million Penguins” was taken offline. There is some documentation of the project in the slideshow on this page. You can also read parts of the project archived on the Wayback Machine or read a report of the project published by Bruce Manson and Sue Thomas in 2008.