Cornucopt Dev Log

Wiki is geeky

August 28th, 2003

Why haven’t Wikis swept the world? They’re easy to use, they leverage the strengths of the whole community when they’re open and of the whole workplace when they’re closed, they include versioning… what’s the problem?

They’re ugly. Damned ugly. That’s the first problem. Half the reason I started writing Wicker is I couldn’t find a Wiki that separated its HTML from its code, so I couldn’t change the way the damn thing looked without wanting to scratch out all my arm hair. Yeah, talk about CSS if you want, but learn from Movable Type: sooner or later, someone always asks, yeah, can we make that box say it differently? Sooner or later you have to touch the HTML. Always. (Actually, “learn from Movable Type” is a good general instruction for Wikis. But now I’m getting ahead of myself.) So, robust templating. Not too hard.

Anything else? Others have complained about the history-free nature of Wikis on the face of things; if the whole world can edit anonymously, you only ever get to see what the present looks like, and anything that’s controversial, one way or another, to the community that edits the Wiki will die. The tyranny of the majority. Some say that the successor to RSS is being held up by this very process. “Day by day and almost minute by minute the past was brought up to date. In this way every prediction made by the Party could be shown by documentary evidence to have been correct; nor was any item of news, or any expression of opinion, which conflicted with the needs of the moment, ever allowed to remain on record.”

Oddly, the simultaneous development elsewhere from which I drew that Orwell quote added accountability to weblogs by adding the same kind of versioning that Wikis have had all along. So, the problem isn’t a lack of a paper trail (so to speak) in Wikis, the problem is easy access to it, and easy affordance of identity for people who want all changes tied to it (a reasonable thing to want).

There are a lot of Wikis that have all this functionality already. But they’re never going to be oriented around that functionality. Wikis were established by native Internet citizens: developers, mostly. Developers want certain things out of their Wikis, and if you want other things, well, they think, the features are in there. The thinking about user goals just hasn’t been done.

I’m not doing it in a really rigorous way either. I’m just thinking, what might a Movable Type user want from a Wiki, and, further out, what might a small business want? I’m sure I’ll find out I’m wrong in numerous instances. I just want to get to that point - where we have a Wiki good enough to be criticized.

(My radical thoughts about ugly Wikis have, of course, occured to others. I have Mr. Shirky’s other points about Wikis in that post in mind as well, and I find the counterpoints about weblogs very interesting; stay tuned for more on that.)

Entry Filed under: Vision