To mark the tenth birthday of wikis (which, um might have been a few days ago but hey :0) here’s something that’s been bubbling away in me for a while…
While thinking out the centered communication paper it occurred to me that I was also writing an anti-wiki treatise of sorts.
So to check out if I with any likeminded souls I rolled over WhyWikiWorksNot and it doesn’t particularly look like it. Lots of stuff about forums and presentation and wotnot but nothing really along the lines that I’ve been thinking.
Which is that one of the biggest problems about wikis (and which is shared, by the likes of me on occasion, in relation to blogs & co) is the ‘wikis are everything we need’ approach.
The more I think about how wikis work, to be honest, the less enamoured I am of them… they are useful repositories of knowledge / project management / group things-to-do tools but that’s about it. They aren’t centered on individuals but on an abstract ‘community’ (although not in a town square way), they are horrendously difficult to track (ever subscribed to a wiki RSS feed… did you unsub fairly shortly after!) and they suffer from all the syntactical and formatting issues that are mentioned in WWWN.
Don’t get me wrong, there’s a need for them, but it’s a pretty simple one which revolves around wikipedia-esque project and workplace collaboration (supported, importantly, as I argue in the paper, by other means of communication).
C’mon, prove me wrong…