Wiki markup no good
What James Robertson posted yesterday could be very true: Wiki markup has no future.
To quote James:
“It was never about the markup anyway. Wikis are about making creating and editing content trivial, about creating structure as you go, about tracking changes and activity (plus more). The “wiki way” never demanded the use of strangle little text commands.”
“It could even be argued that the wiki way is all about usability, so wiki markup is actually opposed to the core principles being pursued. What could be easier than just typing straight into the wiki, with buttons for formatting?”
and
“I would go one step further: don’t deploy a wiki for a broad audience (or within the enterprise) if it doesn’t have WYSIWYG editing. That will start to put some pressure on the developers, and should help to speed the permanent death of wiki markup. RIP and long live wikis.”
I fully agree with James here, although I must admit I have developed some kind of blindness: the longer you are working with wiki markup the easier it is to forget this big usability and adoption issue.
So, although my colleagues in the department have finally begun to do their stuff on our wiki (MediaWiki), I am sure adoption would have been much quicker had WYSIWYG editing been in place.
Related: my other Enterprise 2.0 articles
Technorati tags: , Wiki, Social Software, Enterpriseweb2.0, Enterprise2.0
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posted Feb 20, 10:28 pm on Feb 20, 2008 |
category: Wiki
/ Enterprise 2.0
There is such a nerd factor to wiki markup, which appeals to me. I agree, though, that since many employees may not even know what a wiki is, you need to make it as inviting as possible. I have heard many good things about the WYSIWYG FCK editor for MediaWiki, that many of the kinks have been worked out.
— Natalie Feb 21, 05:14 am #
=== My comment ===
* I agree ** you end up lost in a sea of diff markups ** you then use the wrong mark up in the wrong place
‘’‘Note to self – pay more attention…’‘’ :-)
— Graham Feb 21, 05:57 pm #
Hi Marcel, your post is right on spot. The markup language of media wiki, as used a.o. at our own company, puts a barrier between intention and action: between the intention of knowledge sharing and the actual boring and time consuming stuff of doing so. We all know that people who take the time to share their knowledge, are not always rewarded for sharing and moreover are sometimes regarded as freaks, or as idealists, or as not being productive (it is hard to ‘measure’ the effects of inter-departmental knowledge sharing, especially if the value of departments is measured only at departmental level). Also, it takes time to write a good story; it takes time to explain something really well. This being the case, it is important that there are no unnecessary technical barriers between intention and act. The more intuitive and direct the interface between a person who wants to share, and the carrier of his or her message, the better.
— Mireille Jansma Feb 21, 10:35 pm #
The thing that I don’t understand, is that no one has to use any markup to use a wiki.
I have taught many people how to use wiki and after months they ask me what the bar over the text edit area is, I say it is a wysiwyg bar, they ask who would ever use it?
They are not wiki people to start with, but finding wiki mark up so simple to use, why stop and drag a mouse up to a bar to do a bold, when you can ‘’‘bold’‘’ inline?
— Mark Mar 6, 02:40 am #
I completely get the point about wiki markup being a potential barrier for take-up of wiki by new users. We experimented with FCK editor on our MediaWiki instance a couple of months ago as a way around this. FCK editor in MediaWiki – both excellent in their own right, didn’t quite work together. We didn’t think it was feasible to carry on with it. Main reasons were the hoops you have to jump through to do cut and paste (just not realistic to expect users will go along with the multiple step process required to do it) and some comflicts between FCK editors HTML-centric approach and wiki markup – made for some pretty unfriendly looking pages if you did need/want to revert back to wiki markup view!
I love wiki markup. I think it’s much more efficient to use the MediaWiki editor than the best of WYSIWYG, something like Word. wiki markup makes it so quick and easy to generate content. I agree that if abused it can destroy what you’re trying to build within the wiki though – too much turns folk off from contributing. we’re trying to come up some guidelines for internal use – where it’s appropriate to use extensive mark-up, types of pages etc.
— Simon Mar 10, 01:19 pm #
I am listening to a podcast by Dave Snowden at http://www.cognitive-edge.com/podcasts/3_20070725_040521.mp3.
Who will be the hero or heroine to change the interface of podcasts, allowing listeners to navigate between seconds instead of 10 minute chunks of audio trail? For Snowden’s talk lasts for over an hour, what he says is sometimes simple and more often condensed and complex, and the recording technology is poor. So one hour of listening turns out to be way longer.
Anyway, Snowden raises a good point in favor of using the common wikipedia format, somewhere at the end of the first quarter of his over 60 minutes talk. Wikipedia is the standard, he says (I paraphrase him). People can easily learn the ropes by playing around with artcles in wikipedia. And they don’t want to learn all kinds of different things to do something they already can.
Personally, I think usability is more important than established user habits within companies that have only just introduced wiki’s and where, furthermore, writing for a wiki competes with both arbitrary managerial targets and real business needs. The idea of habit kind of comes apart when discussing these companies. The few front runners within these companies who work with media wiki now, will gladly change to another format if they think that helps getting more buy-in, more co-authors and co-editors, more friends.
But Snowden raises a very good point.
Also, he thinks organisations like governmental departments are completely naive about IT security when it comes to wikis. What he would do about that, boils down to 2 measures: (1) install item level security locked databases; (2) ban all attachments other than formally accepted from those databases.
According to me, this would take a kind of foresight and governance that would hinder getting corporate wikis off the ground in the first place. But perhaps I am mistaken?
Food for thought, I think.
— Mireille Jansma Mar 22, 08:56 pm #
The point of any given feature is to serve user needs. Before saying wiki markup is going to die, it would be better to check who it’s being useful to.
Basically, the pattern we have been observing for our users is that beginners and most of the general public likes WYSIWYG edition better while power users almost always eventually come out using the wiki markup. Why do they do so ? Because it’s faster to use and more effective than doing back-and-forth to the top bar when you’re adding a lot of text at once.
So I’d say that as long as your wiki markup / WYSIWYG / html conversion tools work well enough (that is, if you can keep each interface consistent with the other one), there’s no issue with some people building complex markup structures that most other users will still be able to edit and contribute to through the WYSIWYG editor.
If you can get the best of both worlds, why wouldn’t you keep it ?
— Guillaume Lerouge Apr 2, 12:57 am #