The Company I work for is giving serious consideration to moving the Company Intranet onto Wiki, specifically, TWiki, one of many Wiki Engines and Clones (software based on the Wiki Principles).
In brief, a Wiki is a piece of server software that allows users to freely create and edit Web page content using any Web browser. Wiki supports hyperlinks and has a simple text syntax for creating new pages and crosslinks between internal pages on the fly. The most unusual aspect of Wiki is that the Wiki philosophy is for "open editing" in which everyone and anyone is allowed (even encouraged) to create or modify any page in a Wiki Web site. Sounds a little like kindergarten...
A Wiki can be used to provide many solutions for information collection and presentation, including:
- as a replacement (or augmentation) for a traditional web site
- to update content "in real time" without waiting for a webmaster
- as a document management tool
- to collaborate on projects, documents, and goals
- as a knowledge base or FAQ system
- to design and document software products
- as a company internal message board
- to develop and demonstrate new web-based applications
Wiki can enhance the quality and quantity of available information by improving the ability of many people to collaborate on documenting and sharing what they know. Wiki can also be... uncomfortable for those of us who prefer less egalitarian anarchy and more controlled access in our lives (and our web sites).
Nevertheless, I have been asked to work on the imminent Migration of the Company Intranet to Wiki. In doing this, I've come up with a list of good and bad points about Wiki (specifically, as I said, TWiki). These are my opinions only and relate to only one Wiki clone. Your mileage may vary.
Things I like:
- Page creation and editing are easy; there's no uploading to a server
- Page creation is simple, with styles for free. Just add content; there are no worries about template, chrome, or matching the corporate "look".
- It's very easy to add a new row to a table!
- Simple web pages are made easy to create; complex web pages are made possible.
- A pretty good search functionality comes for "free".
- WikiWords can be avoided or turned off entirely if desired; it is possible to create links that don't use them.
- Wiki use can improve collaboration among several to many people or teams.
- A Wiki "lowers the bar", allowing practically anyone to create nearly any kind of web pages.
- A Wiki makes "personal" home pages incredibly simple to create.
- There's no waiting for a single person to "get around to it"; just make a change yourself.
- For those who find "open editing" to be a scary concept, TWiki is backed by revision control.
Things I dislike:
- Sometimes, page creation is just a little too easy. Links magically spring into existence if you use a "WikiWord" (a word formatted with embedded capitalization). Then you either have to rework what you wrote, create a page to back the link, or leave this weird ugly blue word with a superscript ? in the middle of the page.
- Oftentimes, link creation is more difficult than it needs to be. I like to link to one or more words that are a natural part of the sentence I write. Wiki makes me stop and devise BunchedTogetherWords instead.
- I'm ambivalent about Registration. Registration is a great idea for a public site but inside a company it's also a pain and a stumbling block.
- I loathe the entire concept of WikiWords.. They're ugly, clunky, and difficult to read. This is made much worse if they are used in horizontal or
vertical lists. When pages are all named with WikiFormatTitles I find Wiki search results to be very difficult to read.
- Yet Another New Text Formatting Syntax. Give me a break. We have HTML. Why can't we use HTML. Wikis try to "simplify""... then they add enough goo that the simplification goes out the window. On the Pro side, each TWiki Edit page has a key to the most common formatting codes, with a link to the fuull set. But, on the Con side... they need that key.... and that link
- I dislike the whole concept of "on the fly" HTML translation and "simplified" syntax. HTML presents a rich syntax; why dumb it down?. Worse, attempts to simplify HTML and make it into something else are often fraught with frustration and bugs or, worse, "features" (incompatibility by design). TWiki is no exception. A case in point - the TWiki Table of Contents macro, %TOC%, recognizes <h1> style headers but explicitly ignores <H1> style headers. Ick.
- If documents are created in the Wiki, it can be very difficult to separate them out, download them to your disk, and carry them away for offline perusal. Sometimes this is a good thing; oftimes it isn't.
- No matter how cool it is, any web site can be mismanaged, poorly organized, or cluttered. It can be difficult to remember where you saw something, what it was called, or how to find it agan. With many people able to edit, a Wiki site can be more likely to succumb to the "Too Many Cooks" scenario.
- Although access control and groups are supported, attempting to restrict View access to topics is apparently difficult and is actually discouraged. One wonders why the TWiki team doesn't just fix this instead of discouraging people from trying to secure pages from inappropriate eyes. (OK, so the concept of locking parts of the web aren't true to the Wiki "open editing" spirit, but it's an important and popular Corporate custom!).
Last, neither least nor most, I found that I'm philosophically opposed to what appears to be an important philosophical tenet of TWiki — Wabi-sabi (that term was just created to be a WikiWord :). Wabi-sabi is "a beauty of things imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete. It is the beauty of things modest and humble. It is the beauty of things unconventional."
Okaaaaay. But what about the beauty of things organized, structured, and documented? The beauty of things clarified? The beauty of things that last, improving with time?
I am, shall we say, unconvinced. In the meantime, convinced or not, it's my current project to assist the Company in migrating their Intranet content to TWiki, or should I say, MigratingTheIntranetContent.
I found the following quote from Jeffrey Veen to be very interesting (excerpted from an interview at User Interface Engineering).
Content management isn't a software problem at all. It's a process problem. By solving process problems, you often find you don't even need software. Many companies buy software thinking that it will fix their process problems. But that's like buying Microsoft Word hoping that it will make you a better writer.
Rather, development teams need to create a content strategy that answers several questions:
Why are we generating this content?
Who is the content for?
What is the current user workflow?
How do we get the content into a database?
Posted by: Vicki | November 15, 2004 at 13:44