Wiki usage discussion
A good discussion about Wikis and why non-techies don't "get" the idea of a wiki.
Some interesting comments and suggestions (slightly modified):
- Avoid calling it a Wiki - call it a Knowledge Base or Online Whiteboard
- Make it easy. Usability should be top-notch, and there should be help available everywhere.
- WYSIWYG is a must - Wikipedia-like syntax is a no-no
- Make it worth people's while in the short term.
- Make sure that some things can only be done in the wiki, forcing people to do it.
- Make it a part of performance reviews.
- Pick one thing that will reliably be in the wiki and get people used to checking it just for that. Then branch out. Two good places to start: meeting agenda page becomes meeting minutes that any attendee can modify; internal or product specifications that would benefit from a wiki's ability to branch to background and related pages.
Suggested problems with Wikis:
- People don't know what a wiki is, and they don't much care. Even though they use wikipedia they don't necessarily grasp the concept behind it: They just see a single entry, happily oblivious to how it got there.
- People don't want to learn what a wiki is, unless it directly helps them in the short term.
- People have ingrained ways of doing things.
- Duplicate work; as long as the wiki doesn't replace existing processes, placing things there is simply additional work.
- People don't like not having an "owner" to a document, especially regarding private edits and such.
- Wiki's don't provide a substantial functionality improvement to the "enterprise wiki": i.e., Word documents on a shared drive.
- Wikis require a heroic effort to keep organized. Most people, when faced with creating a new category, or even a new page would rather send an e-mail and forget it. The fact that you have to not only post something, but also decide where it belongs makes the job of posting feel much harder.
- Most wiki software doesn't have an easy to use notification system. Many times you have to manually "watch" a page instead of just watching the whole wiki or a whole category.
Wikipedia 2.0 ?
An interesting article "All hail the information triumvirate" from Nicholas Carr.
He performed a search for ten random topics from a range of knowledge domains: World War II, Israel, George Washington, Genome, Agriculture, Herman Melville, Internet, Magna Carta, Evolution, Epilepsy.
Google will return a Wikipedia link as the first result for all the topics in the list.
If you want an overview of a topic, Wikipedia will usually give you lots of great information in a standard format. Why bother visiting many different web sites when you can get all the information you need from one place ?
Wikipedia 2.0
How can it become even better ?
I would like to have a dedicated discussion forum for each page - not for discussing the article itself (which is already available today and useful to improve the quality of the article itself) but rather for discussing the topic.
Also, I would like a dedicated tab for news regarding the topic. This would make it easier to see latest developments regarding the topic (whether the topic is
Barack Obama,
Windows 7
or
Entourage).
In addition, instead of the external links at the bottom of the page, I would like a dedicated tab for links, where people could add related links (and comments) to provide different opinions about topics.
Where do you get the latest news about Barack Obama or Windows 7 today ?
Where do you go to discuss some of the new features in Windows 7 ?
My guess is from several different sources - why not use Wikipedia as a common aggregator for this ?
For most common topics, could these features make Wikipedia a Google killer ?
IE vs. Firefox vs. Opera
There are in reality two browsers today in Windows: Internet Explorer and Firefox.
However, there are many other browsers if you look hard enough, and one of the best alternatives is Opera (based in Norway, just like PpcSoft).
Opera is very big in the handheld market, but their market share for browsers is about 2.5% (similar to Safari for the Mac).
The main reason I mention Opera is seen in the screenshot above. Chances are that you are not using Opera (based on statistics ;-), and there are two features worth noticing in the screenshot.
1. The heading has a soft shadow that is created using CSS.
2. The hyperlink (pointing at 'Features' in the left menu) has a colored 'glow'.
My point is that text is arguably the most important part of most web sites, and therefore more support for text effects is better.
Sure, you can simulate these headings using images on all browsers, but why use images when you can use text ? The next version of Opera will feature Web Fonts which will give you access to any fonts using CSS.
I just hope that both IE and Firefox will follow suit and improve Web typography in the future...
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