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Ask HN: What are your thoughts on wikis?

5 points by cmelbye ↗ HN
My startup is working on a better wiki, and I thought I'd ask the Hacker News crowd what their feelings were on wikis.

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?

Any sort of opinions you can give would be very helpful, thank you!

9 comments

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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.

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.

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

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 :-)

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.