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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?"
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.
The whole idea of Wiki is based on eastern religion concepts.
Uh, what the hell are you talking about?
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.
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.
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.
I second this wholeheartedly. It can't be emphasized enough that the default style is so easy to read that people will actually use it. We've had a tough time getting people to maintain our internal twiki installation because the default style makes it unreadable. It doesn't help that the tagging language sucks too. MediaWiki is much better in both respects. I'd like to see it support different database back ends, though.
The "cue the foo posts in 3, 2, 1..." posts will commence with no subsequent foo posts in 3, 2, 1...
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.
You're wrong. A bit.
While you are correct that Lotus Notes provides scheduling, contacts and mail, and acts as a development (and production) platform for forms and workflow, it is also a gigantic 'database'.
My employer uses Notes for everything you mentioned, plus storing and relating project and business documents.
Domino (the server engine behind Lotus Notes) can 'webify' Notes documents, and since Notes documents can be linked one-to-another, the links become hyperlinks viewable in a web browser.
Think of Notes and Domino in the same relationship as IE and Apache. Notes provides the presentation front end, and Domino provides the data and relationship backend. In this case, Notes (Domino) documents become documents in their own right, served up as pages of information to a Notes client or web browser.
The drawback to Notes/Domino is the tight control that this coupling requires. We've found that there are too many unknowns and roadblocks to use Notes/Domino as a method of widely distributing information that needs to be maintained by those other than the authors. An author needs to know that a Domino database exists, then s/he needs to gain permission to access that database, and further permission to add data to the database. A reader needs to know that the database exists, and needs to gain permission to access the database, and further permission to read the database. That's a lot of control that interferes with the flow of information. Frequently, the reader needs to become an editor or author, in order to correct mistakes in the document, or add more information. This means more administrivia to conquer, just to correct an error.
This is where a Wiki has it's advantage. It can be built and configured in such a way as to provide the audit trail that corporations need, and even to impose editor/author restrictions based on authenticated userid, but doesn't carry the administrative or implementation weight of Domino and Notes.
So that's the basis of the comparison. We use Notes as a very restricted Wiki.
"values of beta will give rise to dom!"
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.
There are wiki's that deal with this. We use JSPWiki on our intranet; it is a std. servlet webapp. The next version should support authorization, but even without it: I put the webapp behind a mandatory browser client certificate authentication (you can only access it through https, and everyone on the intranet has a certificate). Then with a one-line modification the Edit.jsp is only accessible to people that have a certain role (i.e. a small group of people responsible for the content), but everyone can read.
Versions are tracked in RCS, so any mistakes can be reversed. Also the client IP addresses are logged, and internally it is known who has which IP address. So any of your questions can be answered satisfactorily.
Also it has templates to apply some corporate style. Your mission critical internal product/project, in a large bank, uses it for all important documentation.
So I am right - becuase notes and wiki only overlap on a small portion of functionality, and to say that Wiki will replace notes will never be an accurate statement. Unless of course one uses Notes *exclusivly* for information management, which is not the case.
Wiki could replace the document management features of Notes but would never compete on the aforementioned purposes.
Sounds like wiki would do a good job in competing with some knowledge management solutions.
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
What other kinds of metadata do you have in mind?
The idea is to divorce the database functionality from the email/calendaring functionality. You could use a regular client for the later (such as Outlook) while you'd develop documents dealing with projects inside the Wiki.
Exchange4Linux can get you started very quickly. Everything and I mean everything is in a PostgreSQL database, and it's written in Python. Easy to use, easy to extend. I am currently using it with about 50 Outlook contacts and am doing my part to help make the standards-based IMAP4 server function better.
Theoretically, wikis are best used when everyone has a different piece of the pie and you're trying to put it all together. I know something about implementing module X; maybe another department knows something about implementing module Y; now we have to get X to talk to Y, here's what we know about both. It's meant to be a common repository, best used for things that change in a hurry. ("hurry" is entirely subjective -- three times a week might be fast)
A message board works for this purpose, except it's chronological, which has its advantages and disadvantages. A regular website is too static and would be messier than a wiki.
Of course, you can get creative with wikis... so far I'm trying to introduce it as an open-ended creative game, and a community journal that's admin-monitored.
The wikipedia doesn't necessarily change all that much, but it benefits from all internet users being theoretically able to add their knowledge into the repository.
-Rob
Marriage doesn't have to suck!
exactly. through pagerank spamming, anyone can make their misinformation the top information on google, so you could easily say john kerry is actually herman munster back from the dead, and as long as you boost yourself enough, that makes you the number one liar on google, at the top.
not that i'm saying he isn't herman, but it's an example.
there are some very dedicated individuals watching recent changes as a hobby, so there's usually always someone watching. As Linus's law states: "given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow". With the new verification system in the current CVS, people can rate page revisions for accuracy, as "good enough for 1.0" and other things. The "1.0" is a possible hardcopy/disk distrobution of select (they're not all winners) articles.
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.
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.
I find it somewhat reasurring that MediaWiki is used to run Wikipedia. Since they already have a huge amount of preexisting content, it's in their best interests to make migration from one version to the next as easy as possible.
Of the wikis I've used, I like mediawiki the best in terms of simple interface (most CMSs have a cluttered interface that bombards the user with way too many buttons). Setting it up can be painful, though (it's easy when everything is working like it should, but I've tried a few versions that just refused to run, and I have no idea why).
It would be nice if it had web-based configuration, but I can live without it. I do wish it had a web interface to read/write permissions for anonymous users/logged in users/admin users for each page. I believe it does have some sort of security/permissions system, but I haven't figured out how to use it.
I also wish the "discussion" section for each article was more constrained - like a slashdot-style threaded comment system, preferably with a reputation system, but I don't expect them to implement that overnight.
-jim
thats a sweet sig
-ashot
Case in point... I had a customer come in a week ago looking for vegetarian cat food. I told her that we don't sell it because cats are carnivores... they'd get sick and possibly die if force fed a vegetarian diet. She told me that she read it at "somethingaboutveggiecats.com", so it MUST be true. She insisted. She's also wrong. That whole web site (if it exists) is wrong. All of the people who write for that web site are wrong. I don't care how many people believe it, the fact is that cats are carnivores (because research by experts have established this fact), and a vegetarian diet is not healthy for them. But because she read it online, and there's a following of people attempting to force feed their cats vegetarian diets, she assumes it's true, even though I have spent the past several years researching and talking to people (experts and lay people) about pet nutrition. I've heard countless stories, and have more experience than most people ever will in this admittedly uninteresting subject. The same thing will happen with a "wiki".
_ pe t_and_take_care_of_it
Making up theories and poor experiments (change a wiki and its not corrected in your time frame proves nothing) do not contradict the FACT that you can look something up in wikipedia and look at its history to check for recent vandals, get loads of data, and use google to verify that data - which is usually correct. Every data source is sometimes wrong. The key is verify as much as its importance warrents.
You brought up cat diet as an example.
LOOK IN THE HORSES MOUTH TO SEE HOW MANY TEETH IT HAS, DON'T USE THEORY OR HONORED TEXT (authority) SUCH AS BY ARISTOTLE.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_choose_your
says
"Feed your cat with good-quality commercial cat food, but do not consider cooking for your cat without veterinary guidance. Remember that cats are obligate carnivores, which means that they require meat protein to survive. They cannot survive on a vegetarian diet. There are cat foods which are formulated for cats with special dietary needs, such as cats with poorly functioning kidneys or the tendency to have urinary problems. Please consult a veterinarian before feeding your cat one of these diets. Cats should also have fresh water available at all times."
Your moderated as funny. But this was my exact first serious thought as well.
In Soviet Russia the insensitive clod is YOU!