The email problem
For everyone that says, “I get too much email, dammit, let’s work together on a wiki,” there will be two others that say, “I hate having to go off to some web site to see what’s going on. Can’t we do this on a list?” You don’t notice this now, but I guarantee you will as Wiki usage spreads outward from the alpha geeks to the rest of the world. Businesses are trying to reduce email, sure. (They’re also trying to reduce churn, and wikis can create plenty of churn when used to tackle technical issues collaboratively. That’s only one way to use them, however.) But individuals often stumble, still, whenever they stray from it. Admit it - you know somebody who’s intelligent and gives a lot to the world, but doesn’t really understand the Bookmarks menu.
You can fight over whether the wiki should come to the people or vice versa, or you can just build nice email features into your wiki for those who want them. I plan (eventually) to do the latter. But what will they look like?
Subscription is the most obvious. Just as you can, in many message boards and weblog comment engines, check a checkbox to receive email notice when someone follows up on a comment, you ought to be able to look after a wiki page you create or edit. (Or just want to keep tabs on.) Enough people subscribe to the same page, you’re halfway to a mailing list right there.
The weirder problem is editing the wiki from outside, via email. You don’t want this to be a kludge or insecure, like many email-to-weblog gateways I’ve seen that have you put usernames and passwords in the subject line or first line of your email. You can’t use HTML email with fancy stuff done in JavaScript either, because, well, people hate that shit. What you can do, though, is create mailboxes for each page on the wiki and have them behave basically like mailing lists.
…But that would make people treat it like a mailing list. What kinds of afforrdances could we give a wiki email interface that would help keep the discourse wiki-ish? Or, if you’re feeling saucy, what other forms are possible when you combine email with a web collaboration space? And we haven’t even touched on how to bring multiple wiki pages into this. I have a feeling, though, that RSS is going to be more relevant there.
(Afterthought: hmm… automatically determining which wiki pages are closely related, by number of links? Vulnerable to attack. And it doesn’t really have anything to do with email. But people are going to need more efficient ways to slice this hunka meatloaf I’m putting together… grr.)
4 comments September 28th, 2003