3 ms·

I believe the wiki is among the most amazing things to come out of the web (and think Cunningham is a genius for inventing it, or discovering it, or whatever pr

I believe the wiki is among the most amazing things to come out of the web (and think Cunningham is a genius for inventing it, or discovering it, or whatever process made it happen), and I can't count the number of times I've lost an hour or two spelunking into the C2 wiki. But, I'm having a hard time making sense of this UI. The panels popping up seemingly infinitely into the right side of the screen (every click makes a new panel) is unfamiliar and doesn't seem to provide a compelling value over giving the content a valuable piece of center page real estate. It feels like it is too proud of its cleverness, and that detracts from its value. And, some other nitpicks: The "fork this page" feature uses a flag icon...which means "flag this" to any one who has ever seen a flag. The flashing icons at the bottom of every page, representing every edit throughout history, is hella distracting, and again makes the content play second fiddle to something else going on. There is no way to discover this thing in anything resembling an ordered fashion. Most of the links on the "front" page (I guess?) are dead ends, recent changes provides pages that have content but provide a haphazard approach to understanding what I'm looking at. The neat thing about a wiki is historically that you start in one place, and can follow links back and forth until you grasp your subject. In this case, the links seem to have taken a backseat to the other stuff (which is made up of flashing things, poorly chosen icons, and weird gradient squares that seem to exist for no reason), leaving me hanging here with no idea what this thing is for and how it works. It pains me to say it, as c2 is wonderful (a little dated and simplistic, sure, but the world's first of anything doesn't need to be beautiful). Maybe it'll come to make more sense with time and further contribution from people who know what it is and why it is.

agumonkey 12y ago
I'm both sad and enjoyed by the move. I'm attached to the deceiptively poor old wiki, because it contrasts with the great content quality. At the same time, they're migrating toward something off the map of current technologies, and so the spirit of the first wikiwikiweb is still alive. ps: if someone has an archive / mirror of c2.com, I'll be happy to leech.
- arethuza 12y ago
  "deceiptively poor old wiki, because it contrasts with the great content quality" Does that remind anyone else of HN? I sort of rather like the lack of features on HN in the same way that I like c2.com.
  - TeMPOraL 12y ago
    Yeah, I feel that too (though HN is a bit too bare-bones for me; I think of Reddit as being the golden UI standard of this type of site). I do believe the more superfluous JS you have on page the less likely it is that your content is any good.
- aw3c2 12y ago
  https://archive.org/details/c2.com-wiki_201501 https://archive.org/details/c2.com-wiki_201501
  - agumonkey 12y ago
    Oh, thanks a lot, didn't know archive.org had a system in place to download archived mirrors. 40 well used Megabytes.
    - aw3c2 12y ago
      It's not by me and not from the wayback machine (might be integrated though), just hosted there. A crawl was requested in the archiveteam IRC channel a while ago and someone did it.
- andolanra 12y ago
  It's all still there: http://c2.com/cgi/wiki http://c2.com/cgi/wiki I assume they'll move it over to the Federated wiki at some point, but you can still view everything on the old wiki.
shoover 12y ago
These are all UI complaints and all fixable by anyone with a better idea and JS chops whether Ward likes the particular changes or not.
- SwellJoe 12y ago
  Yes, I believe the UI is the biggest failing, though I am also not seeing a clarity of vision, which wiki very clearly had (making it absurdly easy to create hypertext documentation for anything). Federated wiki seems to be about "federation", or individual wikis that can link amongst each other as readily as one can link between documents in a single wiki. That's a great idea. Federation may be the only thing that can save us from the walled garden age of Facebook, Google+, Github, etc. (or maybe it can't...the UI is gonna have to be better than this if it is). So, I agree that it's biggest problem is UI (and that's what I listed above as being wholly wrong about this thing), but I think it's dangerous to underestimate how much design determines the impact of an idea. I've seen lots of really cool ideas come and go, with bad design as the reason it never takes off. And, it's probably a bad idea to underestimate how hard it can be to fix a bad design, if the design is intimately tied to the implementation. I don't know if that's the case here, though there's certainly a lot of bad design ideas that seem to be important to the developers; at least, they must be important to the developers because they made them flash incessantly. I've poked around some more since posting my initial comment, and I really can't get over how very distracting those flashing icons are, and can't imagine how anyone on the team is OK with it. How can designers of a content system (which a wiki is, at its core) do so much to make the content seem like the least important thing on the page? The user is literally directed to pay attention to everything but the content. Again, I say all of this with an incredible amount of respect for Ward and the wiki. But, this thing is a mess.
  - shoover 12y ago
    You make good points. I guess I'm more hopeful that the UI is fungible if the core ideas shine through. I'll be most interested to see if they figure out a way to make federation easier to understand and use. At first I thought I wanted a globally editable central wiki with some company stuff and links out to individual wikis for project notes, developer knowledge base, and journals. It took a while for it to sink in that only the owner could edit the first one and really everyone needs their own to do anything. It's really hard to shift the mindset from shared state to single owner and fork to like, fork to change.

agumonkey 12y ago

I'm both sad and enjoyed by the move. I'm attached to the deceiptively poor old wiki, because it contrasts with the great content quality. At the same time, they're migrating toward something off the map of current technologies, and so the spirit of the first wikiwikiweb is still alive. ps: if someone has an archive / mirror of c2.com, I'll be happy to leech.

arethuza 12y ago
"deceiptively poor old wiki, because it contrasts with the great content quality" Does that remind anyone else of HN? I sort of rather like the lack of features on HN in the same way that I like c2.com.
- TeMPOraL 12y ago
  Yeah, I feel that too (though HN is a bit too bare-bones for me; I think of Reddit as being the golden UI standard of this type of site). I do believe the more superfluous JS you have on page the less likely it is that your content is any good.
aw3c2 12y ago
https://archive.org/details/c2.com-wiki_201501 https://archive.org/details/c2.com-wiki_201501
- agumonkey 12y ago
  Oh, thanks a lot, didn't know archive.org had a system in place to download archived mirrors. 40 well used Megabytes.
  - aw3c2 12y ago
    It's not by me and not from the wayback machine (might be integrated though), just hosted there. A crawl was requested in the archiveteam IRC channel a while ago and someone did it.
andolanra 12y ago
It's all still there: http://c2.com/cgi/wiki http://c2.com/cgi/wiki I assume they'll move it over to the Federated wiki at some point, but you can still view everything on the old wiki.

shoover 12y ago

These are all UI complaints and all fixable by anyone with a better idea and JS chops whether Ward likes the particular changes or not.

SwellJoe 12y ago
Yes, I believe the UI is the biggest failing, though I am also not seeing a clarity of vision, which wiki very clearly had (making it absurdly easy to create hypertext documentation for anything). Federated wiki seems to be about "federation", or individual wikis that can link amongst each other as readily as one can link between documents in a single wiki. That's a great idea. Federation may be the only thing that can save us from the walled garden age of Facebook, Google+, Github, etc. (or maybe it can't...the UI is gonna have to be better than this if it is). So, I agree that it's biggest problem is UI (and that's what I listed above as being wholly wrong about this thing), but I think it's dangerous to underestimate how much design determines the impact of an idea. I've seen lots of really cool ideas come and go, with bad design as the reason it never takes off. And, it's probably a bad idea to underestimate how hard it can be to fix a bad design, if the design is intimately tied to the implementation. I don't know if that's the case here, though there's certainly a lot of bad design ideas that seem to be important to the developers; at least, they must be important to the developers because they made them flash incessantly. I've poked around some more since posting my initial comment, and I really can't get over how very distracting those flashing icons are, and can't imagine how anyone on the team is OK with it. How can designers of a content system (which a wiki is, at its core) do so much to make the content seem like the least important thing on the page? The user is literally directed to pay attention to everything but the content. Again, I say all of this with an incredible amount of respect for Ward and the wiki. But, this thing is a mess.
- shoover 12y ago
  You make good points. I guess I'm more hopeful that the UI is fungible if the core ideas shine through. I'll be most interested to see if they figure out a way to make federation easier to understand and use. At first I thought I wanted a globally editable central wiki with some company stuff and links out to individual wikis for project notes, developer knowledge base, and journals. It took a while for it to sink in that only the owner could edit the first one and really everyone needs their own to do anything. It's really hard to shift the mindset from shared state to single owner and fork to like, fork to change.