Thursday August 19, 2004

Rant: Why I Hate Wiki/Twiki/SnipSnap/etc..

1. They are overused, often for no better reason than "because we can". As a side effect, wiki nazis are starting to crawl out of the woodwork and harangue people who don't use wiki for their own pages.
   
   
2. I'm used to hand-authoring html and css. I hate the lack of fine control over my layout and structure.
   
   
3. Ugly to look at, often horrible to navigate. I've seen some truly incomprehensible sites with hideous layouts where it's hard to find the information you're looking for, if it even exists at all (not that this is unique to wiki-like resources)
   
   
4. Yet another grungy, nasty syntax to learn. Yeah I could learn it but I'm bored and fed up with learning new ways to do things slower and uglier than before.
   
   
5. Come on, be honest. How many wiki pages have you seen where little or no collaboration actually takes place anyway? Yeah. Loads.
   
   
6. Contradiction in terms though it may be, snipsnap both sucks and blows.

I'm sure there are good uses of wiki and friends out there. Do you know a wiki site on the web that is good looking, well structured, easy to navigate and genuinely useful as a collaborative tool? Add a comment and gimme the URL.