A single open-ended prompt written by the creator of the survey determines the topic the questions should be on.
The first known implementation of a wiki survey was in 2010,[4] and they have been used since then for a variety of purposes such as facilitating deliberative democracy, crowdsourcing opinions from experts and figuring out common beliefs on a given topic.
They can be seen in a more general sense as a tool for establishing consensus in large volumes of people.
Wiki surveys mainly differ from consensus-building in comment sections by using a heuristic which determines the order of questions for each participant that aims to maximize consensus, not allowing replies to questions and providing visualization tools to better understand consensus.
This is done by changing the ordering of questions based on the voting behavior of previous participants so as to maximize consensus.
The heuristic determining the ordering of questions highly values showing the comments that have been voted on the least.
Although being greedy typically has a negative connotation, it is used in a positive manner for wiki surveys.
The 'greediness' characteristic of wiki surveys is thought to also be advantageous, as it allows for gathering more data per participant.