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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?"
[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.
Freeware ?!?!?!?
It's even better then that. It's GPL!. How can slashdot write about GPL'ed software that it's freeware?
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)...
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.
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.
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.
That's Twiki. (Which you can find by consulting the Wikipedia!)
One man's -1 Flamebait is another man's +5 Funny.
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.
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.
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 ##
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.
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!
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
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.
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
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 ?
In Soviet Russia, any wiki can freely edit you!
What other kinds of metadata do you have in mind?
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.
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.
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...
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.
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
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?
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.