Slashdot Mirror
Are we Headed for a Wiki World?
Wikipedian writes "BusinessWeek
asks are
we headed for a Wiki World?. With
US-based SocialText
using their wiki to leverage just $600K in capital, and
European competitor Team Notepad,
not to mention freeware alternatives like
TWiki and
MoinMoin
is the whole world going to be using
wikis
instead of the proprietary dinosaurs like
Lotus Notes?"
[I]s the whole world going to be using wikis instead of the proprietary dinosaurs like Lotus Notes?
God, I hope so. Lotus Notes is a beast. It stops working whenever it feels like it, and occasionally corrupts the database just to make your day.
OTOH, I don't know if TWiki is the answer. Something like it perhaps, but TWiki itself tends to be unwieldily, visually confusing, and ugly. PHPWiki solved many of the problems by taking the KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid!) path, but lost a lot of functionality along the way. MediaWiki (the Wiki that runs Wikipedia) is probably the best compromise, but it lacks some of the security features that make TWiki viable in a corporate environment.
If I had to choose, I'd probably say that extending MediaWiki would result in the best option. MediaWiki is clean, easy to use, and (always important) extremely feature rich. The advantage is that it got that way through several rewrites and careful coding by its maintainers. The disadvantage is that another rewrite might leave you stranded with a difficult upgrade path.
One way or another, a Wiki design is definitely the right idea for corporate "document" databases.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
If Lotus Notes was a character on Kill Bill, it would go something like this...
e ring/iarchitect/lotus.htm
Lotus Notes: Larry, there ain't no mail out there!
Larry Gomez : There ain't no mail out there... Larry... What's your point? That you're not needed here?
Lotus Notes: My point is, I'm the groupware... and there ain't no mail out there to deliver!
Larry Gomez : You're saying that the reason... that you're not doing the job... that I'm... paying you to do... is, that you don't have a job to do? Is that what you're saying? What are you trying to convince me of, exactly? That you're as useless as an asshole right here? Well guess what, Lotus Notes. I think, you just fucking convinced me!
Really, I have to use Lotus at my current job and have had to use it at previous ones too. I never thought I'd say it, but I miss MS Exchange Server. Who needs Lotus when you have pop3 and a text file every can edit...at least it would work most of the time. Never before have I used such a frustrating, stupid, ugly, ineffective product. Give me a ham sandwich over Lotus Notes.
Also of interest, an in-depth analysis of Lotus Notes on the User Interface Hall of Shame.
http://digilander.libero.it/chiediloapippo/Engine
This is good for internal use as far as corporations are concerned but public use makes it a tool for misinformation and disinformation.
Laws are for people with no friends.
http://webcollaborator.com/
This website creates a new free and easy way to collaborate. Before Web Collaborator, to collaborate on a project meant passing papers back and forth, hours of painstaking corrections, hundreds of wasted pieces of paper, headaches, and plenty of coffee. Web Collaborator coordinates collaborations automatically, keeping backups of every revision ever made to the project, letting you see who made the changes, and allowing you to focus on the work instead of managing the work. Better yet, it is absolutely free for all uses.
Each project has three components.
The discussion
This is where you can plan your project and discuss which parts of the project that need improvement. This allows you to have a clear vision for the future of your project.
The project
This is your actual project, be it a paper, a poem, a story, a grant or a proposal. Any collaborative writing can be done in this area. A Fog index is embedded within the project to gauge the level of writing. At any time, you can download it as a PDF document to archive or print for a hard copy. You can also protect the project with government standard Rijandel 256 bit encryption so that even a malicious hacker would never be able to get a hold of it.
The history
This section keeps a backup of every revision. You can see word for word, letter for letter what was changed at any point during the project.
When starting a few internships before wiki's, i could have and would have relied heavily on an internal wiki built by the team's members as they had time throughout the project....damn, i hope we're going the wiki way.
Freeware ?!?!?!?
It's even better then that. It's GPL!. How can slashdot write about GPL'ed software that it's freeware?
You mean that robot from Buck Rogers who had Dr. Theopolis hanging around his neck? Wasn't his name Wiki?
You are in error. No-one is screaming. Thank you for your cooperation.
For businesses, they run the risk of any Joe Shmoe putting libelous or illegal material on company wikis. Browse thru Wikipedia's Slashdot page history to see various defacements.
But not just because proprietary, expensive behemoths like Lotus Notes are proprietary or expensive, but because the web and HTTP are the current application delivery mechanisms. If you can't view it or use it from a browser, then it may as well not exist.
The next hurdle that wiki-type systems will face, though, is metadata. Even if Google got into the wiki business and provded stellar searching technology for wikis, there's only so far you can go before you face the metadata problem. As the project, team, organization, and inter-organization relationships grow, so does the need for metadata to manage it all. This is where RDF and Berners-Lee's semantic web can certainly help out. RDF-enabled wikis would be just amazing.
If that's a Wiki World, that's where we came from and that's where we're headed.
If Wiki World means that everyone will be using wiki's for everything, well, maybe not.
See what I've been reading.
IMHO the Wiki concept is a revolution that's not comparable to any other development since the invention of the Web itself by Sir Lee... Think of Wikipedia or the original c2.com wiki, both examples of the success of this idea. These sites are driven by the users themselves, and are able to gather astonishing amounts of high quality information.
The beautiful thing about Wikis is that they scale to any size. I use Wiki for personal information management. My company uses Wiki as a kind of rapid CMS (which effectively replaced Lotus Notes in that function btw), as do the big sites I've mentioned with millions of users.
Some custom extensions can turn Wiki into tech unbeatable by any commercial product - because the concept just works (tm)...
Comments on Wikidot will be along the lines of "I wanted to read the article, but it's been Wikidotted and erased." That comment will then be turned into a goatse.cx endorsement minutes later.
Even my homepage is a wiki!
Analogies don't equal equalities, they are merely somewhat analogous.
So - you're saying that you don't like Lotus Notes then?
A fine is a tax you pay for doing wrong and a tax is a fine you pay for doing all right.
I will personally endorse this 'productivity' software for my company on one condition...
they give me the ability to anonymously moderate coworkers as trolls!
"If you think you have things under control, you're not going fast enough." --Mario Andretti
The whole idea of Wiki is based on eastern religion concepts.
Uh, what the hell are you talking about?
And that's why we're going to live in a Wiki World. Because collaboration is the solution to everything. Having lots of voices ensures diversity of opinion, which reminds me -- if you support this software project, don't forget to show it by voting for Dean in the primaries!
Which is precisely why Wikis will never catch on. Documentation, like code, was meant to be written and edited by small teams at best - too many cooks spoil the broth (But Dean was cool, so I'm leaving your endorsement in!). For instance, the last time I tried to learn something about a subject by using Wikis, I found they were as twisty as a mass of spaghetti in an Infocom game and John Kerry, and I read blogs!
Maybe it is me but evertime I see a site the has wiki for an FAQ I cringe. I can't seem to find anything on a wiki. ... of course I can't find an example at the moment.
Usually though there doesn't seem to be any content.
That's the biggest strike against Lotus. It makes Exchange look like a work of fucking art by comparison.
I can only speak for myself, but I work at a startup, and we use a Wiki everyday. Since we've got no IT department (yet), we have outsourced the Wiki to somebody like SocialText and it works great.
One word of caution, though: If you value your Wiki information anything (and you should, often it's a big value of your company), make sure that you make backups to some machines not in the hand of the provider regularly: a provider might go out of business, in which case you don't want to loose all your data.
And even more importantly: Make sure you choose a provider that supports an open standard, where you can find another provider to switch over just in case.
We considered many different wikis, but we found only one standard to be already so big that it's very likely that it will still be there in 5 years - and that the mediawiki standard, of wikipedia fame.
Finally, the mystery is revealed.
Instiki is the easiest wiki to setup and configure that I've tried. Especially if you're installing on OSX. And it has pdf and TeX output.
No, not as long as they call them 'wiki's
No serious executive is going to propose starting a 'wiki'. It's just too, er, well, it's a term a man would want to use. A third grader, sure, a girl, of course, but really: 'wiki'? Puhleeze. It reminds one of a luau, or croquet.
As much as I like wikis, in corporate environments, I'd say they're frowned upon as being cluttered, messy, and chaotic.
Some people would call the features of a wiki a disavantage...
"you mean anyone can deface the website?"
"who approved this content?"
"all these links are confusing to everyone - can we have less content?"
"the site needs to look like this other site - we have corporate website standards"
I'm a little confused - how are wiki's and notes even remotely similar? One is a groupware application for scheduling, contacts, and mail. It is also a development platform for forms and workflow. I didn't think that it was generally used for content management or information management. I mean, I don't like notes or anything but I'm just not sure if that's an accurate comparison. Correct me if I'm wrong.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
(1) The wiki does not provide business process automation. Notes can be used to automatically forward items on to the "next responsible party" - it's a controlled, push mechanism. Can't be matched by a wiki.
(2) The wiki does not provide e-mail or calendaring functions.
(3) The wiki does not provide off-line capability. Notes provides an off-line capability that allows you to replicate data back into the database once you connect
(4) Notes gives me the capability to set up my own private area (database) where I propose the security list, that resides on a server, without the intervention of an administrator or anyone technologically savvy. (Ours is called Database-oh-matic).
Net: Notes lives!
Instiki is by far the easiest wiki to setup and configure that I've tried. It would only take you a few minutes to try it out. It's especially easy to install on OSX and after doing so it will show up on your toolbar. And it has pdf and TeX output.
I've recently started a new job, at a managed services company. I've started my own wiki, initially MoinMoin but now MediaWiki, and it's the most useful thing I've ever had for work.
I've put into it everything I've discovered in the two months I've been there, and so has a coworker. Previously there was a lot of formal documentation, but it's hard to leverage in a rush.
The wiki gets right to the heart of what we have to do on a daily basis, and is updated almost constantly to reflect a deeper understanding of the system and when things change, whereas formal documentation seems to be missed and skipped over.
Thank god for Wikis.
Shit, I dunno... better look it up on wiki...
"Faith: Belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge, of things without parallel." - A.B.
I totally agree with the parent post - wiki is good for internal use, maybe sharing company information, etc. But as soon as you turn it to the global audience with the intention of being a general information source, it becomes a worse information reference than any random web page out there. In fact, it might be worse, because random web pages that talk about things like "astronauts never walked on the moon", etc., aren't culled together and presented as fact the way that wiki presents all information. It's been shown repeatedly that there is little to no validation of real-world wiki information. I've read several stories (some here on /.) about people making totally bogus wiki entries that other people support.
Don't get me wrong, I think wiki has it's place, but experience indicates that it should not serve as a generic information source for the general population. At least, not in it's current form. If they hired a squadron of editors and fact checkers, things might be better, but that's not how wiki is supposed to work...
While replacing Notes with a standards-based environment is a step in the right direction, mark up in Wikiland really sucks.
IMHO, the way to go is to combine the writableness of wikis with a reasonable WYSIWYG editor. The "do I use three brackets here or only two" issues with wikis are just too annoying.
I fought to get us onto wiki largely because we had no real source of work info that was easily accessible. So I started a wiki using Twiki. We use Twiki and I love it. Sure it could be better. But it does the job and fills a huge void for us.
I started the Wiki in mid August it had 237 views. 1600 views in September and will probably crack 2000 views this month. Not bad for an internal work site that only 90 people know about.
Wiki Rocks. I consider it Agile documentation.
Bless you! For as long as I've been forced to use Lotus Notes, I've wondered if there was a way to get it to open URLs in an external browser. Thanks to that page, I've learned that that option is changed with the obvious command File-Mobile-Edit Current Location! Of course!
As someone else said, it's a pretty grim piece of software that makes you think longingly of Outlook.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
The whole idea of Wiki is based on eastern religion concepts. Personally I find that a little unsettling.
What?!! I hope this is a joke.
I've heard Ward Cunningham give a talk on how he came up with Wikis and it didn't have anything to do with Hinduism or Buddhism, or any other eastern religion that I am aware of. As I recall the inspiration was Apple's Hypercard - he wanted something like that for the web. He got the name wiki from the name on he Hawaiian bus/taxis which are called 'wiki-wiki' which apparently means 'fast'.
So I suppose if Hawaii is a bastian of 'Eastern Religion' then there could be some slight connection, but your reason for not liking wikis is bizarre.
Dude, get with the current program - that UI Hall of Shame thing is based on a version of Notes that was three major versions ago (about to be four) and like five years old at this point. WHy don't you mention more recent reviews/articles (like all the awards the latest version of Notes has won) instead of recycling some tired, old hack job.
Does Notes provide better CoverYourAss?
500GB of disk, 5TB of transfer, $5.95/mo
..the fact that it's a pain in the ass to use, has horrible UI, steep learning curve for anyone not a programmer and did I mention a pain in the ass to use?
I know everyone hates the Evil Empire, but from where I stand SharePoint looks hot, everybody with money wants it.
IBM never really understood Lotus, and now they are letting it die. Too bad, they were years ahead of their time. Now they are lagging..
Wiki's make everything public, right? I find it hard to believe that every business model can accomodate that, even if more can than the PHBs realize. There has got to be a form of collaberation that allows a firm to control their own IP..
Unless of course we do away with firms owning IP...
Wikis are rotten for threaded conversations - stuff gets overwritten, moved around, refactored, deleted, and it can be horrible to follow a thread (essentially everyone has to follow a layout which indicated the thread structure). This is a job for a message board or mailing list - to make this work properly with the wiki, you need single-signon and workable links between the board and the wiki (plain http links are okay, but smarter linking would be better). Ideally the board will support the wiki syntax, or will support embedding wiki "pages" into posts.
Also, it's hard to automatically syndicate or publish a wiki, either via RSS/ATOM or a mailing list. MediaWiki has a teeny bit of syndication support, but not for ordinary content pages. This issue is when to push a set of changes
Integration with your corporate email system, bug/issue-track system (or CRM system), maybe instant messaging system, or maybe VCS system would also be a great thing. This integration is really the "thesis" of Lotus Notes - that collaboration takes places in many forms, and that rather than force users into one paradigm it's better to make all the modes work smoothly with one another; it's really a damn shame Notes hasn't lived up to the promise this integration has.
## W.Finlay McWalter ## http://www.mcwalter.org ##
check this out: changemypage.com
So I suppose if Hawaii is a bastian of 'Eastern Religion' . . .
Well, does 'wiki-wiki' sound like a Western word to you?
Think about it.
KFG
Notes has had three - count 'em, 3 - major releases since that stuff was put up there, and many, if not all of the points it makes have been addressed. Notes is still one of the best platforms around for collaboration, for development of ad-hoc applications involving sharing information among teams and for publishing to the web. Notes/Domino continues to have just as much market share as Outlook/Exchange - and in fact you can even use Outlook as a client to a Domino back-end server.
Also, it continues to evolve - the next release, number 7, is in beta now. Customers' investment in applications developed under previous releases is preserved as well as ever (not something Microsoft can claim to do), and there's a roadmap that takes it towards a bright new future in the shape of the IBM Workplace.
"Suicide theology"??
Maybe I'm a complete idiot but I find Wiki markup to be confusing and inconsistent. Wouldn't it be easier to use a limited set of HTML tags instead?
Damn, they don't make TV shows the way they used to!
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Wiki -- Anyone can edit it, the momentum of a site is increased because people come back and stuff to it. Not good for important, unchangeable stuff. MediaWiki allows protection on pages, but that's a lengthy process by design. Wiki syntax is confusing to newbies / people with "internet and e-mail" experience.
Message Board -- The person posting is responsible for their own words. Admins can still delete content. People come back and participate in flamewars. :-) Not good for important, continuous topics (something that needs prescience over everything else) or if I want to refer someone to a certain topic -- you'll always have to hunt for it, instead of it being upfront like on a wiki or webpage.
Webpage -- Static, I'm responsible for content (muhahaha). Simple. Wikis get confusing QUICKLY. Reliable, good for reference information that never changes. Boring unless you start using dynamic content, which is what wikis and forums are for.
-Rob
Marriage doesn't have to suck!
The president of my company said pretty much exactly that today, just with different words:
"The problem with Venture Capital is that it's like giving your teenager a credit card."
Tweet, tweet.
Unless your transformative hermeneutics tell you otherwise.
http://www.physics.nyu.edu/faculty/sokal/
FP.
Also FatPhil on SoylentNews, id 863
I've been blogging since '96. A website developer since '93. Developed LAMP websites since '99. A Linux user since '94. I'm no dope. My Slashdot UID is so low, people have offered to pay me for it.
My geekdom established, I just don't get Wikis. Anybody can edit documents, the Wiki tracks changes, but somebody's in charge and can approve or roll back changes. Some sites use them for FAQs, and they suck. What else is there? What am I missing? What makes these things so damned special?
I'm not agitating here -- I really don't get it, and I'm certain that I must just not be in possession of all the facts. Can somebody enlighten me?
-Waldo Jaquith
Please enlighten me as to why they are such a good thing if they have no content or are difficult to use.
Jesus was a compassionate social conservative who called individuals to sin no more.
There are a bunch of wiki's out there now with excellent wysiwyg interfaces. I've been playing with jot and I am very impressed with it. Like you, I'd rather not have to remember yet another markup language and I don't really want to have to explain something like html to somebody either.
MediaWiki rules over all wikis in terms of feature set. Well, MediaWiki & TWiki.
They won't fly on Windows. Well, with Apache & Cygwin maybe. Just because you can do something doesn't mean you should.
So we're left with, what, FlexWiki and OpenWiki. FlexWiki is exceedingly new & lacking in features, while OpenWiki is exceedingly old and lacking in attention.
If FlexWiki ever gets 0.5% of the feature set of MediaWiki, then yes, Wikis may very well take over the world. 'Till then it'll just be for you Lunix hippies. I am so jealous.
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
Another interesting wiki-like application is Tomboy, which is essentially a personal wiki that runs locally.
Well, that's a downer. I'm using 5.0.9, and was looking at his screenshots thinking "At least this new version looks a little better! When are we getting upgraded?"
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
Seriously, if you use Emacs and like to keep notes on variou things, such as work, do yourself a favour and grab Emacs Wiki Mode.
It lets you set up a private Wiki, with each entry just a regular old text file. Honestly, I've spent a lot of time in the last decade coming up with my own record-keeping and note-taking tools and after I found out about Wiki, and especially Emacs Mode Wiki, I've never gone back to older techniques.
That was Twiki. Not that I ever watched that terrible show.
Boobies never hurt anyone. - Sherry Glaser.
...
Forgive me for asking, but the wikis I've seen seem to make as much sense as all the varied and (un)informed opinions that everyone reads on these SlashDot posts and comments.
There is a lot of information in these threads, but how much of it is pertinent, or accurate?
Do you really think wikis can take the place of well constructed, referenced and structured information where and when you need it?
Roger Born
writing.borngraphics.com
"Sorry. No refunds."
"They're not the best at what they do, they're the only ones who do what they do."
Was true in 1993. Still true today.
Also, Wikis tend to be a very simple collaboration tool much like the earlier versions of IBM QuickPlace (now Team Workplace).
Offline is a big issue until you get broadband in the air. If you have to fly or visit a non-internet friendly place, it is very nice to have a selective replica of your important data with you.
instead of the proprietary dinosaurs like Lotus Notes?"
Oh please please please anything but lotus notes!
Calling lotus notes a proprietary dinosaur is an insult both to dinosaurs and to wonderfull proprietary stuff like the MS Word 95 file format.
Dinosaurs have not been extinct as long as lotus notes should have been.
The person who once started development on Notes probably knows how Karl Marx fealt when he saw Stalin in action with his idea (yeah, I know he never did actually).
The only good Lotus Notes database is a deleted Lotus Notes database.
Running Lotus Notes on a 15 year old packard bell pc is a waste of perfectly good hardware.
Running Domino server on a 20 year old Casio calculator is abuse of computational resources.
More usefull exchange of ideas occurs over a campfire made from just one Lotus Notes CD than during the first year after a company wide deployment of Lotus Notes.
Hastily written notes on soggy napkins in a safe on the bottom of the ocean are a more accessible form of documentation than anything in a Lotus Notes database.
It's easier to retrieve information from the bin underneath the office shredder than it is to retrieve information from a Notes Database.
[breathes deeply]
I'll get back to work now..
Also the UI Hall of Shame review is based on someone's shitty custom Mail Template, not the product itself. When people pointed this out, the site maintainer basically just blew it off.
Here is a link to the original wiki created by Ward Cunningham - who was also the creator of Apple's Hypercard software. Wiki is the logical extension of that idea:
http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?TheOriginalWiki
Lodragan Draoidh
The more you explain it, the more I don't understand it. - Mark Twain
We have a wiki in our 125-person company, and it's been more successful in some directions than in others.
It's a great bulletin board or whiteboard for groups that rarely gather in the same place at the same time.
On the other hand, there's no organizational standard to make sure things are logical. Without this information architecture work being done, you have to search the wiki and then spend time reviewing the results in order to find things.
org.slashdot.post.SignatureNotFoundException: ewg
Really, I have to use Lotus at my current job and have had to use it at previous ones too. I never thought I'd say it, but I miss MS Exchange Server.
How exactly does Notes/Domino compare with Exchange ?
Outlook/Exchange is a groupware suite, Notes/Domino is a platform, which happens to come bundled with a groupware suite.
Who needs Lotus when you have pop3 and a text file every can edit...at least it would work most of the time.
If all you need is a mail and agenda, but how exactly do build products like QuickPlace and LearningSpace with just pop3 and a text file ?
I recently came across JotSpot (still in beta), which allows users to work with all sorts of structured data in addition to the traditional free-form wiki text.
It's a cool example of what might be the "next-generation" style of wiki.
why would i want to learn a proprietary markup language and then create web pages using that cryptic limiting syntax?
seems like one of the fundamental aspects of a wiki is their markup language. today i was looking at JSPWiki, and i saw that i had to type "//" for a new line. why not just use a carriage return?!?!? this is just one silly example. some people might like using markup, but MOST people have been using WYSIWYG editors for 10+ years. they aren't going to go back to the tex / roff days.
i said fundamental above, that is not quite right. i don't see a reason why they cannot use one of those fancy javascript HTML editors like EVERYTHING else on the web uses. it would not change the essence of wiki, i think. however, still, i want to write documents, even HTML documents, in my favorite native editor. i don't want to be forced to use a browser plugin or whatever.
i simply don't get it. maybe wikis are good for very simple web pages, but any sort of complex formatted document is not doable.
how about providing a wiki-like "edit" button, but instead of editing the web page, it locks the file for you and allows you to download it, and then post it back when you are done editing it? i know, getting this to be seemless would be tough because there'd be a lot of browsing through file dialogs to specify where to save the file and where to upload it back to the wikiserver from.
Or..
In the bottom status bar select the following.
Edit Current
In Soviet Russia, any wiki can freely edit you!
What other kinds of metadata do you have in mind?
Has anyone ever seen a site using the Slash Wiki plugin? I'd like to install it on my site but I can't find one being used so I can evaluate it.
My name is Carlos Montoya. You share files of my music. Prepare to die.
If you'd like to integrate Wiki into your website, in particular, a weblog, then take a look at Text_Wiki. I'm using this PHP class successfully on my own site and it's a great tool that allows for simpler formatting than HTML and makes formatted text entry a breeze. Wiki entry is the way of the future!
Titus Barik
I think his brain was heading towards calling it Communism but hit a big pothole and spun off the road.
Quickly developing documentation in an environment where a large number of users collectively know everything that needs to be known, but it is not exactly clear who knows what, and no single user knows exactly where to begin with documenting what they know. The wiki helps in this situation by (1) being a central depository of knowledge (2) directing creativity: you don't know what other people might find useful of your store of knowledge, but then someone else starts writing about it. (3) killing self-consciousness over style: the wiki is inherently inconsistent in style, without a clear starting point or index. This has its drawbacks, but also has the advantage that new contributions can be written without regard to the grand scheme of things. I think the wiki model is great in the size range where the user community is too large to efficiently shout across to the next cubicle to the answer for your question, but too small to cost-effectively document everything in some formal fashion.
Too bad the author of the story didn't see fit to mention Ward Cunningham, the inventor of wikis.
"...if Hawaii is a bastian of 'Eastern Religion'..."
relative to the rest of the USA, you'd be right
IMO biggest problem with wiki (weekee), is it's it's too cuddly and chick friendly a name. I'm surprised it's been doing as well as it has with this handicap. I suppose all the cool names have been taken so really have no right to complain.
Its obvious from your post that you work on this product, and you should know that it is likely the most reviled piece of software in business today.
^ Great example of how stupid people are at Lotus. Rather than just trashing their terrible "personal address book" idiom for settings, their solution is to add incomprehensible UI widgets. (Back when I did Notes work, at least 50% of my job was telling people where to find this crap in the settings.)
Perspective
If you like online roleplaying games, check out the rules for a Wiki-based game called Lexicon, designed by Neel Krishnaswami. Earlier this year I ran The Toothpaste Disaster, a Lexicon game using the background for the PARANOIA tabletop roleplaying game. It was great fun, and there are many other Lexicon games around the Web now.
At least the fact that you have to pay for Lotus Notes has discouraged the creation of these Borg Collectives. If it's free we may all get assimilated.
Why would a wiki want to perform the operations better provided by another piece of software? (perl, python, etc etc etc)
(2) The wiki does not provide e-mail or calendaring functions.
Why would a wiki want to perform the operations better provided by another piece of software? (name your calendaring app)
(4) Notes gives me the capability to set up my own private area (database) where I propose the security list, that resides on a server, without the intervention of an administrator or anyone technologically savvy. (Ours is called Database-oh-matic).
Why would a wiki want to perform the operations better provided by another piece of software? (Apache, MySQL, etc)
So basically you don't run software on your computer unless it is a function in Lotus Notes. Why the #$%# would you want to have a message board system provide viideoconferencing??? IM??? Heeellllooo, there are these networks called "Yahoo" and "MSN"...they have a slightly more scalable IM network than your backoffice. VOIP????? What next, HVAC control? Hey, we wanted to get heating in the office but Notes doesn't support HVAC until the next version.
Single-pen Wiki. Now I use a (media)wiki for taking notes on a course I'm developing. I want colleagues to be able to see the work, but I know they won't contribute, and I don't want the site spammed. Therefore, the site is password protected and I permit only registered users to edit, AND I protect most pages so that only I can edit them. The wiki is no more than a convenient interface that lets me edit the webpage easily. This system works very well.
It may be that, in some cases, the most-discussed feature of wikis, the multiple-author ability, is not the most desirable feature.
This thought takes nothing away from the wonderful wiki-based communities. WikiPedia, for example, is wonderful, a true demonstration of a new way of collaborating. This is a nail well-suited to the newly invented hammer.
wiki
pihi wiki
Do not look into LASER with remaining eye!
You need to see the latest TWiki release, using the PatternSkin. Beautiful. Released September of this year.
A little self promotion. If you use Firefox and enjoy wikis, please take a look at the Wikalong Firefox Extension.
Wikalong embeds a wiki in your sidebar the contents of which relate to the URL you are currently viewing.
Think of it as a wiki-margin for the internet.
Why don't more organizations use internal newsgroups instead of wikis?
If you don't know anything about Lotus Notes, why bother using it as an example?
You can implement a Wiki Wiki Web application using Lotus Notes/Domino and you can do many other things with Lotus Notes. It is a development/deployment platform and a development framework. It has a client side which includes email, calendering and other collaboration tools. It has a development side which includes several programming languages including Java, JavaScript, LotusScript (similar to Visual Basic) and a powerfully scripting language. It has a powerful WYSIWUG form, view and database builder. And Notes has the most comprehensive built-in security system I have seen in any tool.
I started out not liking Lotus Notes but I eventually learned that I can pretty much do anything I need done using it and quicker than any tools I have used previously. The closest OSS package to Notes for building web sites is Zope. But Zope lacks many of the other attributes that make Notes a great platform.
He was the co-inventor (with Kent Beck) of the "CRC Card" method used in object oriented analysis and design. He is also one of the "Three Extremos" (the others were Beck and Ron Jefferies) who were early promoters of XP and agile methods in general.
Plus, he's an all around nice guy.
That is all.
Of course there's no accounting for taste, but I bet most people would agree that WikiPedia looks very nice.
No.
Seems it wouldn't be too hard to add everything you mentioned to Zope. Is there something else about Notes? What do Notes users love about Notes?
Slashdot (frequently abbreviated online as "/.") is a popular technology-oriented weblog, primarily consisting of short summaries of stories on other websites with links to the stories, and provisions for readers to comment on the story. Each story generally receives 50 to over 1000 such comments. The summaries for the stories are generally submitted by Slashdot's own readers with editors accepting or rejecting these contributions for general posting. Also sometimes featured are movie or book reviews, interviews, and "Ask Slashdot" queries from users requesting information from the readership. The site's slogan is, "News for nerds, stuff that matters," but Slashdot is sometimes criticized for posting inaccurate, highly biased, and/or inflammatory story summaries that incite heated posting, as opposed to serious news or commentary (see Slashdot subculture). It is also famous for the related Slashdot effect, which often floods unsuspecting websites with traffic, sometimes bringing them down. Getting "Slashdotted" typically produces two emotions: delight in the recognition; and terror that the flood of traffic will bring down your webserver. The name "Slashdot" was invented to confuse people who try to say the url of the site orally (h t t p colon slash slash slash dot dot org)
and much, much, more...
The Kwiki implementation is done in Perl, easy to install, and quite satisfactory. What is cool is that it has a wonderful plug-in framework, with lots of extensibility options.
Brian Ingerson, the author, also has a very clever idea to handle Wiki Spammers (who try to increase page rank) -- Kwiki pushes all links through google.
if you like writing plug-ins in Perl, then perhaps Kwiki is better, but I like C# -- when will someone make a C# wiki?!?!
...on Wikis, please consult this link.
"Mind, as manifested by the capacity to make choices, is to some extent present in every electron." -Freeman Dyson
"Notes has had three - count 'em, 3 - major releases since that stuff was put up there, and many, if not all of the points it makes have been addressed."
Notes has some incredibly cool uses and features. Database power is good. But, IMNSHO, the UI still sucks dead rats through a silly-straw. Even in the latest release. Blech! And it makes even Outlook look light-weight in terms of resource use. Eeesh.
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
I use my wiki as a personal information manager. It is in the web, though, so my friends can reach it and make some comments.
But further than that, the wiki concept works. But you need a comunity to make it really shine. Look at c2.com, or www.cliki.net. Yes, ward"s wiki has a lot of crap inside, is victim of spam and vandals. But the wiki community fixes everything as fast as they can.
"How exactly does Notes/Domino compare with Exchange ? ... "
Outlook/Exchange is a groupware suite, Notes/Domino is a platform
FWIW, Outlook/Exchange does have all sorts "platform" features, both server and client. From what people say, I gather Notes/Domino is still better at it. I don't deal with app development, myself, so I can't really say for sure.
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
Seriously, I brought them up recently at a meeting for a small, barely organized community non-profit I'm on the "board" of. I was thinking Wikis could help, and the minute I said the word, everybody else in the room laughed, except for the one other developer who knew what they were. It sounded like a Star Wars creature to them....
Tweet, tweet.
One thing I hate about Wikis is how disorganized they get. They have no navigation system, and people don't like to mark obsolete pages as deprecated. Also, ones that are publicly accessible on the web get spammed a lot.
Interestingly, I found this out on my comapny intranet. I searched for Notes POP and a wiki page came up with a user's gripes, including lack of POP support. Another user answered his concern with a link to his own wiki page showing how to use POP with Notes. This is from memory so it isn't exact.
1.Find out the server name of where your mail account is. It should be on the mail button.
2.Your POP login name is different then your real Notes ID. I have no idea why this is. You have to look in the address book and under one of the tabs for your entry it shows your mail id. It also even has its own password to login to the mail server. Overwrite it with a known password(it'll encrypt on save).
3.Mark all your mail as unread in Notes. The POP server will only give mail to your client that is marked unread. Even if you've read it and then went back and marked it unread, it download via POP again.
4.Configure your favorite POP client. If you choose to leave your messages on the server, it will appear in Notes as unread the next time you use Notes' mail. If you don't leave on server, the mail dissappears from Notes completely when you get it via POP.
I'm looking for a wiki that supports authentication (passwords) for multiple users without using .htaccess files, and preferably with the option to have different permissions for different sections, so you could have one section that, say, anybody could view or edit, another section where anybody can view but only logged-in users can edit, and a third section where only logged-in users can view or edit.
Does anybody know of any wiki out there like that? I've searched a bazillion wikis, it seems, and I haven't been able to get *any* of them to work with authentication. They all say that wikis were meant to be open, and having authentication kills the spirit of them. Oh well!
Dlugar
Computer Go: Writing Software to Play the Ancient Game of Go
Yes the Wiki concept is just a logical evolution of something very simple, "HTML editing for dummies", yet, it's incredibly slick, useful and democratic. It's a perfect application of Einstein saying "Everything should be as simple as possible, but not simpler", it's also a very nice application of KISS (Keep it Simple and Stupid), in that way it can be called an optimal technolgy.
y
I think, for all this reasons, it will make a lot of Knowledge Management Systems like Lotus and the like obsolete; so it deserves very to qualify as disruptive technology http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disruptive_technolog
this stuff exists in every field, not just white collar office work
this is me, 30 years ago, talking to my boss, farmer smith (no lie, his name really is smith)
"yo, check this stuff out! alternate energy, cool stuff! You get free electricity, you get more from your crops, keep your cash, don't ship it to bigagco! Composting! Methane digesters! solar PV panels!," and etc etc
PHB farmer smith to me -> "dumbass hippie, if that stuff was so good, why aren't THEY doing it, huh? Huh? huh? Now get back to work...."
Flash fast forward to NOW, back working on BIGFARM, INC
This farm I'm on has three WHOPPER HUMONGOUS composting barns, designed for commercial scale composting of chicken litter. Not only is it better for the fields, but now with a big hammermill and some slick packaging, he can sell this stuff for a nice premium to upscale landscapers, and etc. Then, just last night joe farmer boss here gives me his used industry magazines, so I am checking them out in the executive library, cruise to the classifieds, always a interesting place to look... what do I see? BUY THESE SOLAR PANELS, RUN YOUR FARM ON THEM, PUMP WATER, RUN THE LIGHTS, RUN THE FANS! and etc. Next page ACME GIANT WINDMILL GENERATORS 4 SALE! TASTES GREAT, LESS FILLING! FREE ELECTROJUICE! and etc....Next page GROW ALTERNATIVE CROPS IN THESE SOLAR GREENHOUSES, EXPAND YOUR MARKET..."
on and on, amazing. The stuff I was pushing so long ago has hit mainstream with the dudes who resisted it the most, who made a career out of complaining and working hard instead of smart, because "they weren't doing it".
Ever like to just SLAP this "they" guy??
PHB don't believe it until their peers are doing it. Whether it's a white collar CEO at the golf course bragging on his new technology he just got, or a stained-collar "boss of the fields", or any place in between,it's a catch 22, usually it takes one oddball "boss" action dood with serious cred in their field to break the ice, THEN it might happen. The problem is to find the oddball willing to pony up the chutzpah and the cash to make the plunge. Sometimes it takes a LONG time though...
but ya, names.....best advice is cool it on the weird names, PHBs don't get weird names unless THEY think of them.
Wikis are good for permanent content (documentation, notes, etc..). News / message board sites like slashdot are good for time-dependant information.
Slashdot is fun to read because it changes every day. Wikis are useful because what I write will probably still be easy to find after months or years, if it's sufficiently interesting. Hardly anyone ever reads slashdot posts more than a week old. That's mostly because slashdot's content is sorted by time. There's no practical way to search for the most interesting posts ever made about a particular topic.
If you could create a system indexed by both time and content, and could provide separate forums for fact and opinion, you'd have quite a useful CMS. Imagine mediawiki with a slashdot-style threaded comment system instead of a simple wiki-style "discussion" page. Imagine if it could restrict users from editing the most controversial articles to those with excellent karma. Imagine threaded discussions that go on for years instead of days. (And how would you manage a discussion with tens or hundreds of thousantds of comments? What sort of content filtering interface would you need?)
-jim
Does anyone know of a company that hosts an implementation of & has easy to use set-up tools for MediaWiki? Something similiar to SocialText's service, but allowing the posting of more than just text. Thanks for any info
Interesting thing about the Hawaiian language from whence "wiki" came;
It has no plural form. To invoke the idea of plurality, the word is simply stated twice. For adverbs (in the case of wiki), the same treatment is used to denote the superlative. Therefore if "wiki" means "fast", "wikiwiki" means "faster". (the tour bus driver wasn't clear about how they'd denote "fastest" - he explained the noun thing more thoroughly. . . )
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
The file format should be XHTML. Using XHTML rather than HTML allows using XML tools and easier "data mining". Using HTML/XHTML as the native file format means that you can view a snapshot of the actual source in any browser without a server, and edit it with any HTML editor.
What is missing is nice integration of the tools: When I click Edit that should bring up my favorite HTML editor - which might be Emacs! When I save the HTML, the resulting HTML should be copied back to the server, which should validate it, convert the HTML to XHTML if needed, and then check the result into a version control system.
When a server presents a page, it could do a little trivial munging, perhaps embedding the <body> inside a frame or add some CSS hooks, plus adjusting the <head> and top-level <html> to match site conventions.
First you make me say "wiki". Then you make me say "Business Week" and all that comes out is "Business Wiki". Maybe you're right. Maybe we are headed for a Wiki world... ;P
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
"Want proof? Go to several local veterinarians. Count how many carry "Science Diet" by Hills. Ask the vets why they carry it. They'll tell you because it's the best food, which in turn, they also tell their customers. In reality, this is completely false. But a Wiki would agree with the veterinarians and the public on this."
And yet when this story came out, and we had comments like this getting a +5, apparently we have a great deal of faith in sources we can't verify, and pooh, pooh the authoritative one's as unnecessary.
Which Wiki engines can be secured with per-user logins for read and/or edit? We actually use a couple of Wikis in the office, but the IT guy won't open any up to the outside until a login is required to access the content. (I don't blame him.) Preferably something with simple requirements, like PHP and MySQL...?
Downmodding is the refuge of the weak. Don't downmod, make a better argument!
look here http://twiki.org/cgi-bin/view/Plugins/JavaScriptEd itorPluginDev but it doesn't seem very active
I don't think WIKI's are the answer. They're good for groups interested in specific things. I'm in a guitar amplifier Yahoo! (email) group and for all the info that gets exchanged, it's cumbersome to track down old info. If there was a clean wiki that each user could to contribute to, then the info is more useable.(perhaps) I hate Lotus Notes. I have to use it everyday at work which consistently reminds me of how not to make a GUI.
I think the real trick is for contributed information to be intelligently stored in a knowledgebase-type of app that has extensive search capabilities and a simple, uncluttered, intuitive interface.
Does anything like this exist?
Using XHTML rather than HTML allows using XML tools and easier "data mining".
It also means incompatibility with 94 percent, unless your organization has already standardized on Firefox.
If you are using Drupal as a CMS, then HTMLArea is available as an add-on module. You can also check the demo.
While Drupal is not a Wiki per se, it shows the potential for HTMLArea. I use it on my web sites, and it is a real time saver.
Drupal has some wiki add on modules, but I have not tried any of those recently.
2bits.com, Inc: Drupal, WordPress, and LAMP performance tuning.
You are certainly correct that the tools you would use as users and as administrators of a Wiki environment would be lighter weight, but it sounds to me like your real complaints are about implementation and management decisions about your Notes infrastructure that have fallen far behind your needs for flexible collaboration. Notes and Domino can be as flexible as a Wiki. Notes and Domino, can do everything that a Wiki does and they can do it the "Wiki way". Domino can be a Wiki using one of several Wiki application templates for Dommino. It can do it with or without the security that is getting in the way of your organization's productivity. My real point is that all the problems that you cite for Notes are due to two things: the fact that your organization has a lot of information in different Notes databases but apparently hasn't invested in any type of search or index facility to make it easy to locate information with Notes, and your organization has chosen to use security features provided by Notes and Domino that restrict read and edit access to information. Changing over to Wikis would not address those problems. Those problems aren't a matter of how heavy or light the tools are. They're much more about your organization's approach to information management than they are about the tools. -rhs
Sigh..
I'm so sick of people basing notes. Just the suggestion to use a Wiki instead of Notes shows that the author hasn't a clue to what Notes is.
I'd be the first to admit that using Notes purely for email is insane. Bloat to the bloatest bloat.
But it does something very well:
It's not the best email client
It's not the best web server
It's not the best db platform
It's not the best nntp server
It's not the best mail server
It's not the best c&s
It's not the best IM
It's not the best CMS
It's not the best CRM
However, it IS all of the above. Personally I enjoy not having to fight 10 different systems to work together. I gladly accept a few limitations of each individual service for an end result that is integrated AND portable. I can have every bit of information and functionality when disconnected and out of the office as I do when in the office. Can you say workflow?
The biggest problem with Notes/Domino is the limited amount of experienced developers and administrators. 99% of all problems I see with Notes/Dom is implementation. And if anyone is still comparing a Wiki to Notes, they had a bad implementation.
Lotus Notes is NOT a "proprietary dinosaur"!
More of a "proprietary trilobite", I think.
I am anarch of all I survey.
...the world sure is a wikid place!
but only if the specific wiki has a gigantic userbase...
This is just about the most uninformed discussion I've seen on /.
It is a fairly trivial matter to build a Wiki in Notes (or a discussion board, or an e-commerce site). For as far back as I can remember, Notes documents have been automatically versionable, so just create a Wiki form which saves previous versions of a document; give users with anonymous access editor rights on that form; create a mechanism to identify words that the user designates as category links, then have a view onto these categories which you search; full-text index the database to make the entire thing searchable; create a view of the back history of each document, and choose which users should be given the role of being able to re-instate a previous version.
But there are very few technologies available that offer the other features that Notes is predicated on: RAD, security and replication. What replication engine exists to compete with that of Notes? Notes provides fine-grained access, restricting access to the server, database, document, form, even document sections and sub-forms; provides database user levels of manager, designer, editor, author, reader, depositor; provides designer-configurable roles to augment this; provides the means to restrict editing or reading access to single documents; provides encryption of fields or entire databases.
Notes is one of the most amazing technologies. Like a Wiki it too was partially inspired by Hypercard. Even though it is currently at version 6, database applications that were written for version 3 can be opened and will execute on a version 6 server or a version 6 client. Version 3 was released about 15 years ago.
As for it not being standards compliant - whenever public standards reach the level of quality required to replace the proprietary standards used by Notes, IBM modify Notes to use those standards. Most internet technologies are still catching up with Notes.
So it isn't open source... but don't fool yourselves that a Wiki can replace Notes.
I'm using open source for as much as I can in my business (linux servers, Firebird relational database), but there are some technologies for which there is not yet any open source alternative: Lotus Notes, WebObjects, Runtime Revolution.
Just tell me where I can download a Wiki with the following features:
- integrated PKI, use of symmetric and asymmetric encryption, strong authentication
- integrated workflows, set up in a few minutes
- easily take data offline, synchronize only summaries over a slow GPS line, then fully when in the office
- mail/calender/todo/addresses
- trivial programming language (formula), which allows a non-programmer to customize many things, while having more powerful ways for more complicated applications, too (script, c-api...)
- easy integration of relational backend-data (oracle, db2....) and erp systems
- servers available on many different OSes - you want to set up a cluster with a linux and a zSeries-machine? No problem..
- multi-layer security approach, allowing me to have almost any level of security I want
- while being a proprietary system, implementing all kinds of internet standards (smtp, imap4, pop3, http, ldap, iiop, s/mime, eCalendar, vCard..)
I could continue this list, but I am so sick of this stupid discussion. Whoever wants to replace Notes with a Wiki, should replace Excel with a calculator, and gimp with a painting book. Yes, the UI was really proprietary and strange in many ways, but this has improved a lot (while still being far from perfect of course). A product as powerful as notes/domino will need administrators who now their stuff, and training. Whoever compares Wikis and Notes, should attend a training himself.
I suppose you're from the school of thought that says "if English was good enough for Jesus, it's good enough for me".
-- Sigs are for losers
What we see here is yet another try in solving the information management problem. Wiki and Lotus Notes is just one solution, out of many, for the same problem, namely that of managing information in a seamless distributed way.
But the problem will not go away with these tools, because these tools are based on an infrastructure that is not built for the information management task. What we need is a global information management standard that works at the operating system level. In other words, we need operating systems that can manage information, not flat files. And we need a standard so different operating systems can talk to each other.
The whole problem of Wiki Island is here in a nutshell. There are just too many Wikis.
Analysts figure larger companies such as Microsoft (MSFT) and IBM could simply make them part of their suites of software. - Championing a Wiki World
This is a real insight... Microsoft could easily combine Flexwiki w/ Windows SharePoint Services as an easy add-on or integrated web-part and crush some of these companies. Or, maybe one of their competitors will but the company and integrate the technology.
For an extremely easy and streamlined CRM solution that works alot like Wiki's, I've recently been pointed to Typo3.
I'm not sure if it has WikiWiki-words, but that's not so important to me as it is for projects like wikipedia or wiktionary. For normal use, WikiWords are just confusing to regular people.
Typo3 is fully user-editable from the browser, with authorisations and fine-tuned privileges. It even has real WYSIWYG editing (IE only for now, otherwise there are some tags). It is GPL, open source, documentation in Open Office format.
I'm perhaps not the right person to advertise this project, as I've only tested their demo. But after having messed around with pmWiki, TWiki, checking out TikiWiki and others, I can safely say that Typo3 is the best free as in speech solution for a WYSIWYG CRM I've encountered. Forget teaching people to use tags, only programmers will do them. WYSIWYG is where the real Wiki revolution will come.
Of course, finding the right tool for the job may mean another tool is better suited to your unique needs.. E.g pmWiki works for me now, since I don't want to pay for hosting and mess with databases.
http://www.debunkingskeptics.com/
walid information knowledge intelligence
;-)
Of course a misspeleed word in it, but it sound like sth.; it has intelligence and information.
Dilbert will understand
Bye egghat.
-- "As a human being I claim the right to be widely inconsistent", John Peel
What about XML with dedicated DTDs for calendar, meeting minutes, support messages, FAQs, software documentation, etc.? You could use XSLT to create XHTML from those automatically, even on the fly.
--
Try Nuggets , our SMS search engine. We answer your questions via SMS, across the UK.
Domino runs on Linux, and well-designed apps for the web can be used from a browser without any trouble. The bigger problem is probably the nature of the Notes Mail Database design for the web, it blows chunks and could probably use an overhaul to look more like Hotmail or Gmail... but that should not be a hard thing to do. Really!
One feature you'll lose with a web-based mail client though is the ability to function while a server is unavailable (network outage, physically disconnected etc.)
I think a more accurate statement might be that the Notes fat client on Windows is superior to anything on Linux.... a statement more towards the complete lack of competition for Lotus Notes rather than the capability of the software.
Oops, should have previewed... see this TWiki page and this one on how best to edit pages in general.
What on earth is this? Don't you people know the difference between Free Software and Non-free Software?
From gnu.org:
"The term ``freeware'' has no clear accepted definition, but it is commonly used for packages which permit redistribution but not modification (and their source code is not available). These packages are not free software, so please don't use ``freeware'' to refer to free software." (emphasis added by me)
If it's released under the GPL it is *Free Software* and you can do just about whatever you want with it as long as it stays free (under the GPL license). It might not be gratis (free of charge) but "freeware" has nothing to do with it!
So please, enligthen yourself and stop spreading FUD (that goes for slashdot too)!
Life is Reality
As long as you have working RCS, ls, grep, and so on, TWiki will be quite happy (and latest version eliminates need for ls). For an alternative approach, see the this mod_perl cookbook for TWiki on Windows, which only requires a few Cygwin files (ZIPped up on the same page) and also gives you great performance on Windows (where fork is more expensive so CGI typically performs badly).
There's a list of known configurations of TWiki on Windows, with quite a few non-Cygwin Perl ones. Personally I'm a Cygwin fan but I do like ActiveState Perl as it avoids some weird Cygwin Perl behaviour sometimes. There are even people who have installed TWiki on IIS and Microsoft's Services For Unix product...
Finally, the sample TWiki.cfg file includes detaile comments and sample paths to help people install on ActiveState Perl, and the testenv post-installation check tool diagnoses some issues with ActiveState installs and provides recommended setup changes if possible.
Why not just get both of best worlds and just use Groupwise and Wiki.
Groupwise handling the exchange part (email, meetings, and other various things) and the Wiki handling the database part of it.
Well... Groupwise being the lesser (and scaled down) versions evils of the Big Three (Outlook, Notes, and GrpWise)
Now if we only had an opensource exchange client that did everything Outlook, GrpWise, and Notes did we wouldn't have a problem.
From an interview with Ward:
I had read, and squirrled away this article some time ago, and recalled the information incorrectly. I was correct that the central idea behind Wiki evolved from Apple's hypercard stack - I misattributed Ward as the creator of that probably because 'CRC card' is phonetically similar to 'hypercard'. My appologies.
Lodragan Draoidh
The more you explain it, the more I don't understand it. - Mark Twain
Notes is more than mail and calendaring. Notes is used to implement all kinds of business software.
Not only are there several Notes based blogging applications available, there is also a Notes app that does wikis.
It's news to me, but apparently Oreilly has an article about it. Alas, no pictures.
-jim
As with any Wiki, you get some structure with Category topics. For example, if you add a CategoryXml to any page that talks about XML, you can click on the CategoryXml link to find all other pages about XML.
TWiki has several other features which enable users to give structure to content. A TWikiForm[1] can be attached to a page. When you edit a page you get additional HTML widgets on the screen, like for example the "Subject" line and the "Post anonymously" checkbox here on /. A set of pages that share the same type of form is one type of structured content, it is analogous to a table in a relational database.
Giving structure to unstructured content is very important in a corporate environment. The more structure you have the easier it is to run reports and find content of interest by browsing and searching. TWiki has several other innovations supporting structured content:
In addition, there are many more features supporting structured content, such as relational databases integration [12], keeping track of action items with global queries and email notifications [13], special Plugin to query forms [14], and more.
These features allow users with moderate skill sets to create web applications with various degrees of complexity.
[1] http://twiki.org/cgi-bin/view/TWiki/TWikiForms
[2] http://twiki.org/cgi-bin/view/Codev/HowToShowParen tTopics
[3] http://twiki.org/cgi-bin/view/TWiki/TWikiTemplates
[4] http://twiki.org/cgi-bin/view/TWiki/SearchHelp
[5] http://twiki.org/cgi-bin/view/TWiki/TWikiSearch
[6] http://twiki.org/cgi-bin/view/TWiki/FormattedSearc h
[7] http://twiki.org/cgi-bin/view/TWiki/TWikiVariables #VarINCLUDE
[8] http://twiki.org/cgi-bin/view/TWiki/TWikiDocumenta tion
[9] http://twiki.org/cgi-bin/view/Plugins/RenderListPl ugin
[10] http://twiki.org/cgi-bin/view/Plugins/SpreadSheetP lugin
[11] http://twiki.org/cgi-bin/view/Plugins/ChartPlugin
[12] http://twiki.org/cgi-bin/view/Plugins/DatabasePlug