[thelist] wiki

Michal Migurski mike at teczno.com
Tue Aug 17 10:30:22 CDT 2004


> I was researching wikis. I don't know a whole lot about them, and my
> first impression is that they are confusing, especially with the smashed
> together capitalized words and barely structured pages.  Nevertheless, a
> wiki could possibly be useful.

Yes - as a few people have mentioned in this thread, the main barrier with
wikis seems to be the expectations on the users' end. We try to use them
for almost all client communications; every project gets one. Some clients
grok them immediately, and they are wildly successful. Other clients don't
get that they can be edited, or aren't comfortable with changing things on
a website, or just generally prefer email/phone communication.

> Has anybody had experience with a wiki using a rich-text editor? Or have
> you customized a wiki to make it easier for non-html-savvy people to
> use? As "easy" as the wiki formatting is, it can start to look confusing
> pretty quick. It would be nice to be able to insert images or SVG into
> the document, too, so has anybody done that?

Rich Text: With formatting rules as simple as **bold** and //italic//
there's not a lot of room for rich text editing. Don't drop the full
documentation on a client, and they should be able to get by with the
half-dozen or so basic link, list, heading and text style marks. Any more
than that and they're looking at Perl.

We haven't yet figured out an elegant way to support inline insertion of
images, but we also haven't yet come across a situation where the
additional complexity would be justified. Same for SVG - that's just
asking for feature bloat. :)

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