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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?"
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.
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.
"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!
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.
Yes, indeed, the concept just works. And besides - it is fun. Just enter your information in a somehow formatted way and your cow-orkers will correct it, amend it, modify it and (in my case, TWiki) I am notified of changes - so I can immediately review their changes.
It is fun, it works, it is addictive, building a general knowledge base around products, problems, clients, projects.
It is a way of communicating within a group without everyone being on line, with having the possibility to weed out the noise.
I like it *VERY* much.
2c,
Mark
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.
Actually, I don't think hiring people to keep wiki honest would go against the spirit of wiki any more than getting paid to work on free software would go against the spirit of free software. I think the open source model works best if people have a stake in keeping the project progressing -- which includes deleting junk material in wiki entries just like you would delete junk code from an open source project. If Wikipedia had the funding to pay people to delete vandalism and other crap, it would be much more consistently reliable. As it is it is much more reliable than I ever would have expected most of the time. I contribute a reasonable amount to wiki, so I notice how quickly vandalism gets noticed and removed, at least on popular pages. Subtle misinformation is more difficult -- entries have to be reviewed by someone familiar with the issues -- but I think if it was someone's full time job to do this, a lot less would slip through.
These sites are driven by the users themselves, and are able to gather astonishing amounts of high quality information.
And isn't that the problem? There's no way of KNOWING if the information is good quality or not. Just because the majority believes something, in no way makes it real. If "Wikis" were the source of information hundreds of years ago, we'd all still think that the world is flat, Earth was created in 7 days, and that black people are inferior. "Majority rules" is not a way to determine whether or not information is valid. I'd rather read something by one intelligent person with credentials than something written by 1000 idiots.
I don't respond to AC's.
And everytime I see a site that has a FAQ that's not a Wiki I cringe. Most sites might as well call it a NFAQ (not-frequently asked questions). Exactly who's questions do they typically answer (not mine), and how many times do I have to ask a question before it becomes frequent? Or for that matter, how do I even ask a question? For 95% of the FAQs out there those are hard to answer questions.
The advantage of a Wiki is that the users can guide the content, rather than some marketing droid making up questions he wished users asked.
[Sure, I do know there are supposed FAQ applications which allow users to post questions, but nobody seems to use those either. A Wiki makes it immediate.]
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!
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.
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.
You're right in that business critical documentation should be owned and edited by only a small team. Making this documentation available to a wider audience is where a Wiki comes to the fore.
I've been running a Wiki in our department at work now for a couple of months. It was slow to start with, but people are starting to catch on now. Find a better way to do something? Add it to the Wiki. Know where all the spare printer paper is kept? Add it to the Wiki. Know the location on the network drive where the crucial licence agreements are kept? Add it to the Wiki. The list just keeps going on.
Wikis are great for sharing knowledge. Like any knowledge sharing initiative they require a knowledge champion to oversee new additions, assist users having problems and generally tidying up. They are a great collaborative tool when you have everyone's buy in. A real leveller in the workplace too. The newest temp can correct the managing director - anonymously if needs be.
Brought to you by the author of such childrens' classics as "Some Kittens can Fly!" and "All Dogs go to Hell."
Your point is absolutely valid. On public sites with user supplied information there's never a guarantee for good quality.
:)
Still practically this does not seem to hinder many projects, IMHO for the great social effects in such open environments (believe it, or not). As far as my personal experience goes, for example Wikipedia articles have always been correct and well written.
The same argument could be applied to open source development, where the situation is much the same: a lot of code is contributed to big projects where quality control happens as collaborative mechanism.
So...Reality proves different.
I like Mediawiki, but I have found that the code under the hood is a bit messy. It seems difficult to change the default look of the wiki without modifying the source code directly. Be that as it may, Mediawiki does still work very well.
I had a conversation with one of the top IBM Australia execs at the "open source" section of IBM Forum in Melbourne earlier on this year, and I asked him what was stopping IBM from using Linux on more desktops within their organisation (from memory he said that the desktop spread at IBM is something like 95% Windows, 5% Linux). His response was that it was only Lotus Notes that was holding them back.
Andrew Tridgell (Samba), who at the time was doing some work for IBM in Canberra and had just completed a panel discussion on the use of open source software, joined in the conversation and started fervently campaigning for IBM to ditch Notes in favour of the use of a wiki. The other IBM bigwigs who were floating around after the session gravitated over to the conversation and seemed genuinely interested in any technology that would free them from having to use Lotus Notes!
I'd wager that given IBM's newfound interest in OSS, a shift in trend from Notes to using a wiki would be something that is taken very seriously indeed.
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I tried getting people to use a wiki (TikiWiki) at our place, but it soon got killed off.
1.) It was classified as over complicated - it had more than 4 options, a login requirement (for security and personalisation).
2.) The example styles included did not have a grey option.
3.) Thirdly, and perhaps more importantly not only was it Open Source, but I had it implemented in under a day whereas all the other (more important) people had spent several months trying to get something implemented and used.
4.) Nearly forgot - the name.
PHB: "What the f*** is a Wiki? We can't have something called that."
Sometimes it really sucks to know Dilbert is real...
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and much, much, more...
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.
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.
That hasn't been my experience. Suppose you find a wiki article claiming that Science Diet is the best nutrition for your pet. If you changed it to say "Science Diet is a scam, feed your pet X", it'd probably get changed back. On the other hand if you changed it to say something like this, I'll bet people would leave it alone, or modify it slightly while keeping your main argument in place:
I have found that Wikipedia is full of articles that handle dissent in this way quite well. By the way, I would be interested if you could point me to objective research about pet nutrition - I always wondered about Science Diet but didn't know who to believe.
"Why would a wiki want to perform the operations better provided by another piece of software? (perl, python,...name your calendaring app,...Apache, MySQL, etc)"
How about because not everyone wants bunches of apps with their own individual bunches of security holes and upgrades to fool with? Maybe they want a groupware app that does everything they need?
My guess is that you have never even really used Notes or seen a really well-done Notes deployment in a mainframe/mini to PC environment. Done correctly and with thought and planning put into it, it is a thing of beauty and ultra-powerful. I don't care much for IBM, but even I can't deny how great an app Notes is. (when implemented by someone with a bit more background than reading "Learn Notes in 15 Minutes").
Your pet Linux apps aren't always the answer, friend. I suggest you broaden your horizons.
That's right.
I worked briefly at IBM Mexico (circa 1997) and the big office suite battle was in full swing. One day they decided to delete MS Office and replace it with Wordperfect Office (being an acquired IBM product).
It was common to show clients how IBM was ussing their own products and suggest what a prototypical business operation should look like.
Now if they don't even support their own products that's quite a blow to their own reputation. For IBM reputation matters when dealing w/big business clients.
I think what they have to do is evolve Lotus (rebrand it?) and plan a graceful exit. And in that way offer the appearance of supporting and planning for their customers.
Was it Lotus SmartSuite or WordPerfect Office? I thought IBM bought the Ami Pro wordprocessor over and bundled it with Lotus 1-2-3?
By the way, IBM is really not doing enough for Lotus Notes since it bought Lotus. After they bought Lotus, they converted their own mail system to Notes (they ate their dog food, which was right). I don't see why they should dump Notes internally. What are they going to use? WorkPlace? Can Workplace do what Notes are doing?
And if Notes is keeping them to convert their clients to Linux, why not a Linux client for Notes? They have an OS X client, which is effectively BSD, and in turn, effectively Unix-like.
Finally, IBM should really intensify their marketing and show the big corporations how WorkPlace, Domino/Notes and Websphere (their flagship application server), and DB2 are _the_ products to use.
"My Slashdot UID is so low, people have offered to pay me for it."
My Karma is low, but nobody has offered me anything.
Perhaps Slashdot should randomly reassign ID's so we don't have people trying to brag about how early in their career they started wasting time here.
There's a Mac OS X wiki that does just that.
It's called VoodooPad and information can be found:
http://flyingmeat.com/voodoopad.html
The PHPTal templates make that a lot easier than it used to be but the way they've switched to a modern XHTML+CSS approach may mean you don't even need to modify it at all - I just created an internal documentation wiki and was able to hit our standard look using only a custom stylesheet.