Monday May 14, 2007
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Monday May 14, 2007
The good thing about wikis is they're written by geeks for geeks.
The bad thing about wikis is they're written by geeks for geeks.
I love wikis.
At Sun we're a techy firm - we have cool stuff - that's why I work here. Some of the things we use are in what I would call at best perpetual Beta... We have a test called 'the dog food test' - if you can eat it yourself and it's ok then it's probably good enough for customers using computers all day.
I believe for general public consumption the test is a lot harder - the Eskimo test. If you were an Eskimo and I gave you this product could you use it ? Wikis fail. Don't get me wrong I love them.
But most (open source) Wikis currently lack
- WYSIWYG editing - as Peter Reiser correctly stated - wiki syntax is dead. It needs to die - who needs multiple different syntax's for different wikis Twiki, mediawiki etc. when what we really need is a powerful WYSIWYG editor
- A comprehensible navigation and categorization method / mechanism - preferably a hierarchical navigation model. People who currently use the web are used to this - moving away from this without a killer search tool or navigation model is really hard
- Business level (Sarbanes Oxley) control / security /Access Control - for both view and edit. All business
- Some form of personalization / customization / portal functionality - a customized view of the wiki with pertinent user interface for each individual end user that comes to the site.
You're right on. In many small (but cumulatively large) ways wikis are still a long way from being user-friendly for "non-geeks". Add to this that it's another application to learn (albeit the WYSIWYG interface is making it more familiar to the casual user), AND it requires a rethinking of how the user shares and finds information, AND it requires integrating it into one's daily workflow, the barriers for effective usage can still be very high.
That all said, I too love them :) They are wonderful tools for making information available in a somewhat structured format quickly. Add to that the ability to leverage built-in tools (such as search, watch features, and feeds), and they are great for those of us who are somewhat geeks :)
Posted by Scott Brown on April 08, 2009 at 09:54 AM PDT #