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Simon Willison Posted…

I’ve been doing a lot of work with Wikis over the past week or so, and they are absolutely fantastic tools. I set up a wiki on our company intranet which is already filling up with valuable information, and I’ve also installed Wikis for Smarty and MACCAWS, both of which are proving useful. The beauty of the Wiki model is the simplicity–anyone can edit anything using a markup language that takes minutes to learn, and revision control ensures any problems caused by this freedom are limited. I’ve also been considering the possibilities of converging Wikis, blogs, link directories and forums in to one bizzare hybrid super-wiki.

Incidentally, if you are looking for a good PHP wiki engine TaviWiki is well worth considering–it has a good set of basic functions and the code is nicely constructed, making it relatively easy to start hacking in new features.

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paul Posted…

But the Web was meant to do this, surely?

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Nate Posted…

The interesting thing to me about Wikis is the context–take the largest group of annonomous people and allow them full editing rights to a web site. I can’t think of an instance that compairs well to this in the physical world. This has too effects, one is that it seems to make it less the vicitm of unwanted additions (there is no challenge or rebellion as in grafitti), and it also makes it one of the most difficult concepts to explain. It’s almost a requirement that you are curious by nature to figure out what’s going on with a wiki. The biggest problem the I’ve found with Wiki’s is their organic structure, they don’t have the benifit of the oppressive vision of “how this site is strucutred”, which makes many conventional sites decipherable (search functions and top level organization do help however). I see the best use of wiki’s as what Simon mentioned, wiki’s setup on a very focused topic.