The idea of wikis, the whole concept of collaborative authoring, is so enticing that it seems like it should be the default (at least if you don’t need more structured markup behind it), even in the enterprise. At least, that’s what I thought some years ago. People still like to send around office documents with revision marking turned on, however, rather than fully embrace the Brave New World.
I tweeted that one problem is likely the offline issues (can’t read the document on the airplane unless I’ve saved a copy first); Edd added the “lost document” problem where you can easily lose a document when someone deletes the link to it, and you never find it again. Spam, as Norm pointed out, is another issue on the internet, though it shouldn’t be on the intranet.
And then there’s the issue of wiki markup, which some people detest. One project I’m working on for Sun is using MediaWiki, for which you can export a document from OpenOffice, so that helps with at least getting the first draft of the document into the system. There’s still the update problem; I gather that is slated for a future release of the wiki publisher extension. When that works, I hope it will make it easier to talk certain members of my team at Sun into using the system willingly <grin>.
Hey Lauren, you might like to take a look at TiddlyWiki, a small Open Source wiki I contribute to.
The entire Wiki is in a single HTML file, each “wiki page” being an editable paragraph, stored in the HTML as a div and presented using Javascript bundled in the same file.
You can save changes back to a local file URI, attach TiddlyWikis to emails, pass them around on USB sticks, much as for office documents. There are also several server side versions, with different slants on storage, dealing with conflicts and authentication — one of the easiest places to try a single file, user version being http://tiddlyspot.com
It’s pretty extensible, with a neat plugin and adaptor architecture. Folks have written adaptors to import/export to and from other Wikis including MediaWiki, and the dev / user mailing lists are pretty active:
http://tiddlywiki.com
Looks very interesting — thanks for pointing it out!
Hi Lauren,
I started porting our documentation to wiki about 3 years ago. It’s been such a success that we now mirror the content to an external copy. I use dokuwiki (which also has OpenOffice conversion) mainly because of the low threshold for unskilled users and because it uses flat files instead of a database. It has radically changed my role as technical writer from being a writer per se to being an editor, supervisor, mentor and facilitator.