
The sad evolution of wikis - blasdel
http://apenwarr.ca/log/?m=201009#01
======
silentbicycle
I've been lurking on the c2 wiki (and occasionally posting,
<http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?ScottVokes>) for almost ten years, and the culture
there feels _completely_ different from Wikipedia. The c2 wiki isn't a blip on
most programmers' radars, though, let alone the world at large.

Back when I was preparing to become a librarian (academic research or possibly
a medical archivist; before I got sucked into the software engineering
vortex), I spent a fair bit of time talking with my coworkers and professors
about the relationship between rapidly-mutating secondary (tertiary?) sources,
such as Wikipedia and blogs, and _actual primary sources_ based on _actual
hardcore effing research_. The c2 wiki did not once ever come into the
discussion, because nobody cared about HowComeLispAndSmalltalkAintPoisonYet or
DoesRelationalRequireTypes. It was too alien a culture.

I think the author is on to something, that the Wikipedia culture of anal-
retentive editing and (worse yet) knee-jerk "[citation needed]" has been
bleeding the spontaneity out of the popular concept of wikis, so people are
much less inclined to just post stub documents and collectively flesh them out
as time allows. Often, the expectation that writing ends up polished prevents
it from appearing in the first place. (Documentation or otherwise.)

I've successfully pushed for a wiki literally everywhere I've worked through
the last decade (including the library system, which has a great and actively
maintained collection guide, based on mediawiki). Sometimes it took
offering/threatening to run my own server specifically to host one, and it's
always taken some content-seeding and nudging to get things in motion, but the
net results have always been positive.

~~~
ecaradec
mediawiki it also a very complex wiki, and as it somewhat became the standard,
non programmer got afraid by it and didn't want to edit anything by fear of
breaking something or not knowing how it work.

~~~
regularfry
I had it explained to me that "MediaWiki's purpose is to power Wikipedia. Your
personal wiki is a side effect."

------
sunir
I started MeatballWiki (<http://meatballwiki.org>) just over 10 years ago to
wax poetically about wiki culture, codify it, and try to reproduce it in other
environments since I thought it was superior. However, Wiki cultures have been
difficult to keep sustainable let alone easily reproducible.

All non-reproducing communities need both openness to attract new people
faster than people leave, but closeness to protect itself from negative
people. Most wikis lack an ability to close themselves off in a non-hostile
manner (i.e. 'turtle mode'). You may laud the wiki culture method of keep
order, but I've helped hundreds of wikis defend themselves with "soft
security" (<http://meatballwiki.org/wiki/SoftSecurity>), and I found it is
actually a cynical process.

In terms of keeping the culture going, since wiki process is based almost
entirely in social custom, it requires a lot of human energy to teach
newcomers and fend off attackers. Teaching requires more effort than physical-
world communities because of the low bandwidth of communication on a wiki.

I think there might be a new evolution one day where some of the older wiki
cultural principles will be reimagined, perhaps unknowingly, in media that has
a better balance of human effort to community value. After all, healthy wikis
are a wonderful experience so there is no reason they cannot continue to
thrive and adapt.

~~~
silentbicycle
You probably feel like you're yelling into the void of space, but I really
appreciate what you've done with Meatball and Usemod. If you ever come through
Michigan, I'd be happy to buy you excellent ales, coffee, tea, etc. (Beer is
really our strong point, but I also know some _amazing_ coffee roasters, etc.)

------
jsankey
To me it sounds like the success of NitWiki was down to the culture of the
30-person team. I'm guessing this stemmed from some leaders in that group, and
applied to more than just the wiki. I'm not sure that much has changed over
time - it's just not trivial to cultivate the right kind of culture.

Re: the public vs private debate, if you want to make a great public wiki,
then maybe you have to make "open" the default. This requires letting go of
the fear of sharing too much, although my personal experience suggests we tend
to be more afraid of this than is necessary (e.g. "stealth mode" startups).

------
jhrobert
Before 2005 most Wikis used to be easy to use, considering the target audience
at the time (computer literate people).

Nowadays, with 500 millions on FB, the audience has become "the rest of us".

Unless I missed something, I think that there is currently no easy wiki for
this audience. Neither the older wikis, c2 style, nor modern ones, wikia or
wetpaint style, for example, are simple enough.

I mean, what wiki service would you direct your kids or your parents to?

That's a sad situation. But it is also an opportunity.

I am working on a dead simple wiki, c2 spirited, but 2010 style. This is alpha
software at this point. You may want to pay a visit (and, yes, WikiWords
work). Sometimes it run at <http://simpliwiki.com>. Feedbacks welcome :)

~~~
RiderOfGiraffes
Currently down:

    
    
        The following error was encountered while trying to
        retrieve the URL: http://simpliwiki.com/
    
            Connection to 184.72.45.204 failed.
    
        The system returned: (110) Connection timed out

~~~
jhrobert
It is now installed on an Amazon EC2 micro instance, much cheaper than the
small instances, as a result I don't stop the instance anymore.

Thanks for trying, maybe another shot?

------
thyrsus
I believe there are services that allow one to make annotations on web pages.
Perhaps they allow one to control the degree of sharing; that might go some of
the way toward what Mr. Pennarun wants. An annotation might link into or out
of a private wiki.

I'd like something even more modest: a better place than Wikipedia to discuss
software. Wikipedia policies just don't allow what I want for current
software. E.g., look at the near uselessness of
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReStructuredText> (if it's still there?) and
then look at the discussion page and history to see all the useful content
that's been deleted. Or just read the text next to the broom to feel the
essential "Go away!" point of view. Is there a better wiki for software
topics? Or are Google searches the best one could hope for?

~~~
silentbicycle
Try the original wiki (<http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?FrontPage>)! It lacks the anal
"[citation needed]" culture that wikipedia has acquired, and it's been focused
on software since its birth. (I've been lurking and occasionally posting there
for about a decade.)

They have obvious biases (a lot of the original content was written by
Smalltalkers and XP / Agile people, for better and worse), but it's worth
checking out.

------
lionhearted
I used to think Wikipedia is neutral. Lately I've been kind of shocked - I
don't know if this is a new development, but check out these two pages:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augusto_Pinochet>

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fidel_Castro>

Look at the tables of contents. If you didn't know better, you'd think
Pinochet was more corrupt and murderous. But, Castro killed 10x as many
people, tortured 100x as many, stole orders of magnitude more money and
wealth...

There's 36 links in Castro's Wikipedia table of contents. Only four of them
are mildly negative: 9 Controversy and criticism, 9.1 Human rights record, 9.2
Allegations of mismanagement, 9.3 Allegations of wealth.

There's 24 items in Pinochet's table of contents. 10 of them are very
negative.

2 Military coup of 1973, 2.1 U.S. Backing of the Coup, 3 Military junta, 4.1
Allegations of fascism, 4.2 Suppression of opposition, 5 Arrest and trial in
Britain, 7 Secret bank accounts, tax evasion and arms deal, 8 Human rights
violations, 9.1 Demonstrations

If you didn't know better, you'd think Pinochet was a very bad man and Castro
was a good man. But regardless of your politics, Chile is a much nicer place
to live than Cuba these days, yet Cuba was a much nicer place than Chile
before Castro came to power. Castro's policies destroyed Cuba. Whereas
Pinochet has a mixed, but pretty good record. Hell, Chile just passed net
neutrality laws last week.

A similar article is this one -

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_surge>

By almost all analysis and objective metrics, the 2007 troop surge worked.
Violence went down, insurgency went down, attacks went down, crime went down
afterwards. But if you look at the article, it's loaded with criticisms,
opposition, and things unrelated to that particular military campaign. Then
there's a quick blurb, "Interpretation of the surge's results ... Whether the
surge led to the improvement in Iraqi security, or other factors caused it, is
disputed by some."

Wikipedia is not neutral. It's edited by people who have more free time on
their hands are and are more tech savvy. People with more free time who are
more tech savvy tend to skew demographically, which is sad, it should be a
neutral resource and would be better if it is.

Compare the Castro and Pinochet articles if you want to see it in action,
you'd never realize that Pinochet was a much better and more effective leader.
They both did bad stuff, but Pinochet did less bad stuff and more good stuff.
His country was worse when he took power, and better afterwards. Cuba was much
wealthier, prosperous, and better off before Castro, and is much worse now.
It's a shame that this is misrepresented in Wikipedia.

~~~
lazyant
Both Castro and Pinochet were military dictators that killed and tortured a
lot of people.

To compare how good or bad they were by comparing how prosperous the countries
are is silly, one of the reasons being the external influences.

Pinochet's junta "disappeared" over two thousand people and tortured over
30,000 (people with names, not estimates). I don't see any credible source
stating that Castro killed 20,000.

I actually see this type of Castro/Pinochet comparison as a test for Human
Rights and checking if someone is inconsistent because of their right/left
wing preconceptions. I find most people dislike or hate one while justifying
more or less the other when they are both basically the same.

~~~
lionhearted
> I find most people dislike or hate one while justifying more or less the
> other when they are both basically the same.

Fair enough, I'm not here to argue the merits of one murderous dictator over
another. The point is that Wikipedia has 36 sections on Castro with only 3
slightly negative, and 24 on Pinochet and 10 of them are very negative. You'd
agree there's a bias there, yes?

~~~
lazyant
Well, I didn't make a comparison study between the two articles but I just
read the first ones on Pinochet that you said were "very negative" (Military
coup of 1973 and U.S. Backing of the Coup) and they don't seem negative to me
at all, pretty mild if you ask me. This overthrowing of a government would be
the equivalent of Castro's revolution so I don't get your point sorry.

~~~
berntb
First time I've ever defended Castro even partly. :-)

>>This overthrowing of a government would be the equivalent of Castro's
revolution

Arguably, Castro overthrew a dictator. Allende was, afaik, quite
democratic(?).

Castro did break promises about general elections. He took over and got
military/economic support from other dictators.

The main difference is that today Castro+family are _still_ dictators of Cuba
-- while Pinochet and his junta are gone since a long time, leaving a quite
nice country.

And this is totally off topic for HN and the article, of course.

------
DannoHung
Using wikis to manage a small team's internal documentation and shit is a
PITA, particularly because you get into a situation where you need to _sort
of_ replicate some formatting on a bunch of different pages but then, whoops,
nobody knows how to use the template system in a sane way.

Live preview and some sort of not-shit WYSIWYG would make wikis for small
teams _much_ nicer. Then what'd make it even _super_ nicer is lightweight
macros and pre-made templates that could be stored in a per-user or per-
category way. Like... github, but for wiki-stuff.

~~~
riffraff
have you tried confluence? Anyway, even in the free/open world, a lot of wiki
software come with simple wysiwyg editors and templates

~~~
DuncanIdaho
As a Confluence user I have to second that.

For a small team Confluence is an even more "no-brainer" than MediaWiki,
etc...

~~~
eru
First time I ever heard something positive about confluence. (But I only heard
about it, because we use it at work and people like to complain about it.)

~~~
DuncanIdaho
Could you elaborate on what their complaints are?

To me its waaaay better than Sharepoint - which we also used. And it is way
more suitable for "non-technical" and "non-wikisavvy" users than e.g.
MediaWiki.

~~~
eru
I have never used Sharepoint. Fortunately I do not work in a Microsoft shop.
(Though we do have to bear Exchange Server.)

One minor misgiving about Confluence is its syntax: Opening and closing tags
look the same. So {noformat} both starts and ends its environment. I haven't
done anything fancy myself with Confluence, so I can't comment on the other
complaints. (And we do use an ancient version, because we have some custom
changes, and nobody has found the time to port them to the new version.)

------
joe_the_user
One paragraph stood out:

 _Unfortunately, outside of wikis, the world itself has also been busy
evolving, and in a way I don't know how to deal with. The new problem is:
teams are the wrong size now. Thirty dedicated, full-time programmers was an
ideal number for NitWiki. But who has 30 dedicated, full-time programmers now?
I mean_ really _dedicated? You can be a very successful Internet startup with
way less than 30 developers. Maybe you need only two. Maybe those two aren't
even working full time on the one project. And two people don't need a wiki._

Has the programming world changed so much in ten years that 30 person teams no
longer exist? What do people think?

~~~
dkarl
In a thirty-person team, you have smaller groups working on different things,
all nominally coordinated by the manager who in practice heavily depends on
capable developers to help manage the subgroups. Since every convenient method
that exists in a large company will eventually be formalized and fetishized,
it was inevitable that someone would seize on the idea of breaking up the
larger team and formally replacing it with a set of small teams with fluid
membership.

Now a large team is seen as grotesquely unwieldy, bureaucratic, and high-
overhead, kind of a laughable concept compared to smaller teams, even though
large teams were normally run as a set of fluid, informally organized smaller
teams. With a single large team, a certain amount of mandatory overhead is
incurred at the team level, and individual groups within the team can adopt as
much or as little overhead as they think appropriate. One person can work
alone, or all thirty people can work in concert. Informal groups within a team
never have a formal existence, so they can form and unform at will. Everything
depends on judgment and discipline, and the greatest risk is chaos. Sounds
kind of lightweight and agile compared to an "agile" process like Scrum, where
each small team has a formal existence, a minimum size, mandatory
administrative overhead, and a prescribed methodology, doesn't it?

------
ahi
Xanadu? Ted Nelson, not Olivia Newton-John. <http://xanadu.net>

~~~
silentbicycle
I think I know what you mean, but could you elaborate? It's a non sequitur
otherwise.

~~~
russell
Xanadu was a pre-web attempt to create all that the web is and more. It failed
because it was too ambitious and too complex technically. For example, links
were two way, so from a document you could find all the documents that pointed
to it. It supported micro-payments. I think it was going to support itself by
skimming from the payments. It was pre-internet, so they had to invent a
communications infrastructure on top of POTS. I visited Xanadu for an
afternoon in the mid 80's. The programmers were talented and very dedicated,
but it was obvious that they were having difficulty converging on something
that was simple and worked.

Contrast this with the Web which had two simple protocols, HTML and HTTP,
which could be implemented easily and extended by the multitudes.

