When A Good Idea Goes Bad - Tennant: Digital Libraries

Tennant: Digital Libraries

Blog

Tennant: Digital Libraries

« AL on LJ: Tempest in a Teapot?... | Main | Where Goals Belong... »

Link This | Email this | Blog This | Comments (4)

Roy Tennant

When A Good Idea Goes Bad
October 8, 2008

Wikis are a good idea. They bring web authoring, and even collaborative web authoring, to the masses. Let a thousand flowers bloom. But there are right ways to do it and wrong ways to do it.

The right way to do a wiki platform is to have a completely WYSIWIG (What You See Is What You Get) editor that mimics a word-processor, so even someone who has never seen an HTML tag can create a good looking and well functioning web page. Another benefit that wikis can provide is a simple way to create new pages that don't require access to the command line or knowledge of FTP. The last aspect any good wiki platform should have is that if someone knows HTML and wants to use it, they should be able to do so. These few things are the core aspects of any good wiki platform.

The problem is that we are burdened with wiki platforms that do not meet these basic criteria, and I count the MediaWiki platform, designed for Wikipedia, as one of the very worst of the lot. Sure, I can't think of any wiki platform that completely fails on the ability to establish new pages, but the editors can vary dramatically. The MediaWiki editor is, well, challenged. It is so challenged that I am frequently driven to wanting to put my fist through my unsuspecting laptop screen. Why? Thanks for asking, I'll tell you why.

First of all, the options for editing in a WYSIWIG mode are both few and brain-dead. You are offered only a dozen options for everything from making a word or phrase bold or italic to linking to a "media file", which is apparently quite different than linking to any other file (who knew?).

Meanwhile, your options for going "outside the box" are severely limited. Unlike Drupal, for example, which will allow you to to also use HTML markup should you know it, MediaWiki prevents one from following through on any such deranged idea. What a feature. So now I have to learn yet another markup language in order for it to be translated on my behalf into the markup language I know, and would prefer to use. Meanwhile, my collaborators who perhaps don't know HTML are so severely limited in their abilities to author web pages that they may as well be inscribing rocks with chalk.

So here's the thing -- don't ever take a really good idea and completely screw it up. Understand the essential parts that make an idea good. In the case of wikis, I submit that there are only three -- and the MediaWiki platform screws up two of them. How that could possibly happen is anyone's guess. But I suppose we should be grateful that we have such an object lesson -- the first step to implementing a good idea is to understand what makes it good in the first place.

Posted by Roy Tennant on October 8, 2008 | Comments (4)

Industries: News & Features, News & Features

October 9, 2008
In response to: When A Good Idea Goes Bad
mc commented:

if you don't like MediaWiki, you could use Wiki Matrix to compare/research other wikis out there. wikimatrix.org

October 9, 2008
In response to: When A Good Idea Goes Bad
Roy Tennant commented:

mc: thanks for the advice, but my point wasn't that I am stuck with bad wiki software and I don't know what to do about it, but that it is possible to have a good idea and yet screw it up in the implementation. It isn't enough, in other words, to have good intentions -- you also have to *be* good. And the first step to that goal is to understand what that means.

October 9, 2008
In response to: When A Good Idea Goes Bad
Eric Celeste commented:

Roy, I think you missed the point and history of wikis. "Wiki" means "fast" and the fist wikis were created in 1994/95 long before most people had any idea how to use HTML and long before there was anything like WYSIWIG editing on the web. I'll grant that wiki markup syntax is an odd and unstandardized beast, but that oddity grew out of the free-for-all development that characterized wikis. In fact, the world of wiki developers has been working hard for years to fix this tower of babel by creating a common markup called Creole. One could argue that they should all use HTML, but that overlooks the fact that (A) for many HTML is still a mystery and (B) there are aspects of HTML (and especially XHTML) that could interfere with a site's ability to render its pages successfully if they were misused. Your criteria seem a bit off base to me. The first two are met by most wiki software without any WYSIWIG editing. You can create pages on almost any wiki without knowing HTML or most wiki markup. You may not make the prettiest pages, but you can write text, make paragraph breaks, and create a link (that last one is hard for novices even in most WYSIWIG systems I've seen). Your third criteria is actually a bit off base. Rather, a wiki should make it easy for someone to create content without regard for the site's design or implementation. The user contributing should not have to worry that anything they do can possibly make the site not render the page properly. They should not have to worry about the style of the page. They should be able to focus on content alone. This is part of what makes wikis fast. They are focussed on content contribuition, tracking, and even rollback. They are focussed on the work, not the glitz. Sure, WYSIWIG editing would be wonderful in wikis and I love those interfaces when they work. But most are broken in subtle and frustrating ways. I often end up dropping back to markup (HTML or otherwise) on these systems. I'm happy to let them mature. How could it be that Wikipedia is succeeding even though it fails to meet your criteria? Because your criteria are actually not the most important. The most important criteria: speed, robust rendering, editing history, and easy rollback of changes are well met by the MediaWiki platform and most other wikis.

October 9, 2008
In response to: When A Good Idea Goes Bad
Eric Celeste commented:

There were paragraph breaks in that post, I swear!

But this silly comment editor does not know to treat blank lines as a break, something every wiki platform does naturally.

So, let that undifferentiated blob of text serve as an object lesson. Wiki's make editing easier if you just let yourself forget about beauty and focus on the words.