
Ask HN: What are your thoughts on wikis? - cmelbye
My startup is working on a better wiki, and I thought I'd ask the Hacker News crowd what their feelings were on wikis.<p>Do wikis have a place in your company? How are you using wikis in your company? What software are you using right now? What do you like about it? What are your problems with it?<p>Any sort of opinions you can give would be very helpful, thank you!
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caw
My experience with Wikis are that are only religiously updated by 1-2 people.
Everyone else just kind of goes meh. But you absolutely have to document
things somewhere that is shared for the bus scenario.

My requirements for a wiki:

1) Awesome search. Xwiki has a very good search, including in attached
documents

2) Fine grained access controls. I need to be able to have a space W with
pages X,Y,Z, and Z needs to be public, but nothing else.

3) I need to able to use my existing authentication systems.

4) It needs to be user friendly. XWiki has some serious usability problems for
anyone who hasn't used a wiki before. Confluence is a bit nicer.

My nice to haves:

* Site-based documentation. Sometimes I have a workflow that's 80% similar, but the exact steps depends on the site (Example: ssh to this host, run these commands). I don't feel that it justifies having a separate page for each site when the content is mostly the same.

* Editable from my Linux environment, preferably via command line

* OneNote integration

I've used mediawiki, xwiki, twiki, and confluence before.

If you can provide me with most of the things above, and either the source
code, or a service SLA (or both), I'd probably buy.

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pudakai
We use wiki from earliest stage as a repository for all sorts of information.
We don't go out of our way to get fancy it, though, so we don't need a lot of
advanced/refined functionality.

I've been through this cycle a few times, this time we are using MediaWiki. I
don't remember what we used last time, I think it was a Drupal-based wiki.

None of them made a whole lot of impression on me either good or bad.

I agree w/the other posters that this is a pretty ambitious goal ("better
wiki") - I'm like a lot of other folks in that what is out there is more than
enough and we probably don't even exercise 10% of the features.

I also agree w/the other poster that said "people don't bother". Very true,
stuff usually doesn't end up in wiki unless I put it there or I ask somebody
else to do so. Very few people will do this habitually without a lot of strong
and recurring encouragement.

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andymoe
Just about all of the available Wikis suck really badly. The built wiki in
FogBugz is OK and I think Wiki Server in OS X Lion is quite well done but will
never get traction outside EDU. (I also worked with the Apple Wiki Server team
for a bit so I am biased)

Meadiawiki, pbwiki and Confluence are at the top of my list of wikis with
really poor usability. I think the WYSIWYG editors are in most need of fixing
(Write your own - if you can't do this you should not be building wiki
software) followed by tracking changes and linking of documents together in a
manner that allow you to easily track groups of interesting docs without being
overwhelmed by updates after a certain point.

The last thing the world needs is more poorly done wiki software so aim high
:-)

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jstanley
An internal wiki is very useful when the team grows larger than 5 or 6 people.

Before that, it's just a lot of effort to maintain compared to the benefit
that arises from it.

EDIT: But I personally wouldn't pay your company for wiki software unless it
is _seriously_ good. There is a lot of free wiki software that is good enough.
Also, for non-technical users, an internal wiki will be less useful. It only
works when people are interested in editing it, and in my experience that is
pretty much only technical people.

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debacle
The wiki we have now (mediawiki) isn't easy enough for the layman, and isn't
integrated enough for them to be comfortable with it.

Internally, the dev teams and the IT staff use the wiki, but externally
everyone uses Microsoft OneNote and there is no way for us to possibly
convince them that a wiki would ever be better.

OneNote seems sort of like a wiki for the masses, and I think if you could
create wiki software that is as easy for lay people to use as OneNote, you
would have yourself a marketable product.

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quorn3000
<http://wardcunningham.github.com/>

I think Ward's Smallest Federated Wiki is an interesting direction to go, and
should really be taken seriously.

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brudgers
How are you going to make money from a wiki when there are so many FOSS
alternatives in the market?

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batista
If it's not Wikipedia, don't bother. Wiki's suck both for "project
documentation" and for internal company use.

For one, it assumes multiple people want to edit it. People don't bother.

