This one deserves a post. I had briefly encountered wikis several years back and have been curious about them ever since. Other teams at my workplace maintained wikis as informal information bases and this especially suits teams that write a lot of code.
What is a wiki? For those in the dark, it's an online application that looks a lot like a regular website. Except that it lets you edit your content online. This nifty application lets you focus on the content more than the nitty gritties of getting the files published. A great side-effect is that we can now have more than one person editing the content. Anyone with permissions can modify/add to the content and create new webpages within the site. But watch out - it has its own little syntax shortcuts that influence formatting of text or any other content.
Just recently I chanced upon wiki services online and found that one could launch a wiki just as easily as a blog. Or so I thought. The registration was simple enough. But very quickly I have uncovered the challenges.
A wiki is no fun without a bunch of people updating it. And you want this team or group to be as excited about logging in information as you are. ie, despite the learning curve in understanding the formatting of text. For a programmer, this might be trivial but I surely cannot see non-software folks warming to the idea of watching every punctuation mark that gets interpreted as a text formatting cue.
Despite all, I am continuing to give my wiki an honest shot! Documenting my many experiments can get a boost with this. Do check out my Deep Thought Workshop wiki.
1 comment:
Looks interesting! I am not familiar with these, but I guess the possibilities are huge.
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