Wiki is not wiki
The word wiki is derived from a Hawaiian word meaning fast (Ward Cunningham actually got the idea from the Wiki-Wiki Cab Company which he saw when he walked out of Hawaii airport), but Joel Spolsky disagrees. In fact I agree with him, the syntax of wiki’s is not easy for people to get to grips with. He says….
I was recently talking with a friend about setting up a Wiki for his co-workers, to share information and ideas. But his co-workers are not tech people, and we both decided that the Wiki markup would be too much of an obstacle.
I know there are ways to shoehorn WYSIWYG editors like TinyMCE into a Wiki, and some have rudimentary editors built in. But most Wikis seem to encourage the use of some special syntax. I found a presentation on Wikipedia (http://wikimania2006.wikimedia.org/wiki/Proceedings:CS1) which makes this philosophy explicit. They even suggest an editor which shows formatted text along with the Wiki codes, so people can be sure to understand the semantics of the markup. I quote:
“Vision: computer literacy should involve understanding the difference between the model and the view.”
My question is: are they nuts? I’m a decent computer programmer, and even I hate trying to remember the Wiki syntax. For tables it’s a joke. No normal person wants to use this. It’s hardly better than HTML, plus if you write something in Word or Excel first, you have to take the time to convert it to markup.
Wouldn’t a decent WYSIWYG editor be an improvement, even if it’s more difficult to program? You could strip it down to the basics, and use styles (a la Word) to put in the semantic information like headers and outline levels. If we want to encourage more people to edit web pages, why not allow them to use tools they already understand?
(Granted, maybe it’s good to have Wiki markup as a barrier to entry for sites like Wikipedia, to discourage vandalism. But this isn’t true for all sites.)
his OA is here