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The problem isn't the idea of the wiki. It's the implementation. Any non-techie gets how to write a blog post in Wordpress. Spacing, make things bold, etc. I've

by geuis 18y ago

The problem isn't the idea of the wiki. It's the implementation. Any non-techie gets how to write a blog post in Wordpress. Spacing, make things bold, etc. I've been editing with various wiki software for years and I still find it cumbersome. If you can have a system that is a wiki under the hood but has a normal-person level interface, you would see more usage. Regular folks have better things to do than learn our odd syntaxes for doing things. It's not something that saves them time because instead of being easy and automatic, they have to break their trains of thought to do this "wiki" thing. It's no different than when your coding in the zone and your manager interrupts you about something marketing wants.

wallflower 18y ago
>The problem isn't the idea of the wiki. It's the implementation. We use Atlassian's Confluence. Confluence is a nice collaboration tool built on wiki concepts. Us techies used a wiki prior but Atlassian's almost-a-wiki-but-not-as-scary-as-one is now so popular that it is a major issue when Confluence is down. It is pretty much company-wide now and updated almost every minute.
- JimmyL 18y ago
  +1 for Confluence Yes, it's not free (or Free) and is made by a pretty established company, but it's a solid product, Wiki enough that if you want to get into it, there is a lot fo customization and detail that you can do, but at he same time friendly enough that if you don't care, you can just use the WYSIWYG editor to make your point. It also integrates nicely with JIRA, although I doubt that's used by much of the HN crowd. As for getting people to use it, my team made a rule that if you sent us a question that (in our opinion) belonged in the wiki, we'd answer it there and send you back a link. After a few weeks of doing that, people just stopped asking and went there first.
bayareaguy 18y ago
Not all wikis are that way. I regularly share stuff with non-techies via Jottit. e.g. http://jottit.com/n3yhk http://jottit.com/n3yhk
ahoyhere 18y ago
Agreed 100%. The idea of user-editable content isn't the problem. But wikis are an unknown quantity and a slippery concept for non-nerds to grasp. There are no affordances, no guidance, no structures to help orient people[1], and while wiki syntax is awful that's only a contributing problem. It's like if a carpenter/handyman/car repair guy handed you a smooth, featureless egg-shaped object and said "This is a Ziki. You can do everything with this tool. Now, check my tire pressure." Even if you knew how to check tire pressure in general, you'd be SOL. Second issue is that people use wikis for things other than collaborative documentation, just like people use blogs for project management (just because they're easy to install), and that's not helping the adoption problem. [1] I don't mean the document tree, either. People are used to structured content.

by geuis 18y ago

wallflower 18y ago

>The problem isn't the idea of the wiki. It's the implementation. We use Atlassian's Confluence. Confluence is a nice collaboration tool built on wiki concepts. Us techies used a wiki prior but Atlassian's almost-a-wiki-but-not-as-scary-as-one is now so popular that it is a major issue when Confluence is down. It is pretty much company-wide now and updated almost every minute.

JimmyL 18y ago
+1 for Confluence Yes, it's not free (or Free) and is made by a pretty established company, but it's a solid product, Wiki enough that if you want to get into it, there is a lot fo customization and detail that you can do, but at he same time friendly enough that if you don't care, you can just use the WYSIWYG editor to make your point. It also integrates nicely with JIRA, although I doubt that's used by much of the HN crowd. As for getting people to use it, my team made a rule that if you sent us a question that (in our opinion) belonged in the wiki, we'd answer it there and send you back a link. After a few weeks of doing that, people just stopped asking and went there first.

bayareaguy 18y ago

Not all wikis are that way. I regularly share stuff with non-techies via Jottit. e.g. http://jottit.com/n3yhk http://jottit.com/n3yhk

ahoyhere 18y ago

Agreed 100%. The idea of user-editable content isn't the problem. But wikis are an unknown quantity and a slippery concept for non-nerds to grasp. There are no affordances, no guidance, no structures to help orient people[1], and while wiki syntax is awful that's only a contributing problem. It's like if a carpenter/handyman/car repair guy handed you a smooth, featureless egg-shaped object and said "This is a Ziki. You can do everything with this tool. Now, check my tire pressure." Even if you knew how to check tire pressure in general, you'd be SOL. Second issue is that people use wikis for things other than collaborative documentation, just like people use blogs for project management (just because they're easy to install), and that's not helping the adoption problem. [1] I don't mean the document tree, either. People are used to structured content.