Open Thread: Do You Wiki?
We’ve covered a lot of wiki software here at WWD. And yet, looking out in the “real world,” wikis still seem to be a pretty marginal endeavor. Many companies and projects don’t have a wiki at all. Others have fallen into disuse and disrepair, becoming nothing more than link spam farms.
You’re a cutting-edge bunch of readers, so let’s get your take on the situation. Have you found productive uses for one or more wikis in your own web work? If not, why not? Is the peculiar wiki markup the hurdle? Some missing capability? The difficulty of explaining what a wiki is good for to your coworkers and clients? The comments are open for your experiences and thoughts.
Related:
- 15 Productive Uses for a Wiki
- Get Organized: Keep All Your Information in One Place
- Springnote Offers Easy Wikis
- Making the Wiki Work
- OpenTeams Offers Wikis with Structure
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I love the piece on uses for wikis. I’ve always thought they would be extremely useful for collaborative project management and might even have a use in consensus building for mediation or developing policy. My only problem with them is that I haven’t had an opportunity to use them for any of those purposes because I don’t currently work any place they might be useful. But might they not be at work in corporate intranets, being used for project management or knowledge bases?
I haven’t used a wiki in any professional capacity, but I set one up for my motorcycle, just as a place to stash info.
Not sure if Wikipedia counts, but because of the blogs I write and manage, I refer to subjects there all the time. I haven’t used any Wikis specific to my work, but I have a client that has a design related blog and we were toying with putting up a design glossary wiki. Just not sure if it would end up being our job to constantly update or if people would actually take it upon themselves to add their input.
Also, I have a hard time getting my client to use my webapps correctly, like Basecamp. I’m not sure she fully grasps the wiki idea.
I use the trac wiki. Not just for managing code repositories, but for workflow and project management(you can disable all the ticketing and code related aspects). I even set up a wiki for my wife and me to use in daily life. I store my recipes, house dimensions, furnace filter size and more on it. Then when I’m at home depot or ikea I can bring it up on my iphone.
I disabled the ticketing system at home in fear that household work would start getting arranged into milestones.
I’ve found that non-techie people tend to shut down when you mention wikis. I think they get intimidated by the idea of a new technology and they become less willing to give it a shot. However, if you describe it as ‘a web page where we can manage our stuff’ they’ll sometimes give it a shot.
On a personal note, I’ve had a great time using wikis with my extended family. We’re using one to plan a big family vacation and it’s working really well – especially because several of us live in different cities. We’ve posted all of our lodging ideas, restaurant ideas, embedded Google Maps pinpointing different locations, etc. It’s been a big hit…
The first time I ran into wikis years ago I had a less than positive reaction – mainly because of the strange and non-standard markup syntax – but these days I use them in just about every context. Twiki for corporate and TwiddlyWiki for personal stuff.
I love wikis! I have Trac setup for several projects at work and for personal use I have a Mediawiki setup to store all my personal stuff
“Is the peculiar wiki markup the hurdle?”
Has been every time I’ve mentioned a Wiki.
I know wikis are extremely useful, for personal and business use. Lately I’ve been searching for a good wiki with a few requirements.
The number one requirement is that the wiki must have a WYSIWYG editor. So that people with no HTML knowledge (or people who aren’t technical) can also work with it. It’s also a lot easier for yourself.
A few other requirements are File Attachments, Revisions, Permissions, etc.
I have tried Socialtext, TWiki, Dokuwiki and Mediawiki. Unfortunately I find them not suitable for use in a company.
I have been trying to install Socialtext for over a week now and I still haven’t succeed. I find this until now the most promising one. It has WikiWyg (a WYSIWYG editor for wikis) integrated, tags, file attachments, rss feeds, etc. But the installation is too difficult and no support for MySQL and Apache 2. You can see how far I’ve come with Socialtext by looking it on Dokuwiki. Which doesn’t work very comfortable.
MediaWiki doesn’t even have a WYSIWYG editor. You can use Wikiwyg as an extension, but it is not recommended. Installation can be done, but updating is also not an easy task. If you want to update with Wikiwyg installed, then you have a problem.
TWiki is very easy to install in Debian, it has no WYSIWYG editor and the learning curve is very high.
Dokuwiki has a extremely easy installation. Plugins are also very easy to install. But it hasn’t got a WYSIWYG by
default. There is a plugin, fckw editor, but as you can see a lot of people are having trouble installing this plugin. Including me.
I found that most wikis also don’t have the possibility to create a “new page” from every page like a sidebar, topbar, whatever. Usually you have to install an extension for this or create one yourself. I find the tagging, which is default in socialtext, extremely useful, but couldn’t find it in the other wikis. I know how socialtext works because I used their virtual machine which they say is a demo.
I’m have just tried Deki Wiki and I am extremely excited. It has everything I need: WYSIWYG, file attachments, revisions, tags and a lot lot more. If you download the virtual machine and the vmware player, then you’re already done. Deki Wiki is a true recommendation.
My work (150 employees) uses Mediawiki for our intranet (which replaced having one great big networked drive for everyone’s documents).
After 10 months, it’s great. Gets lots of use, and people have really taken ownership of their content.
Still a FEW holdouts who are afraid of the markup, but that was expected.