Scott /
PmMail

 
On Fri, 17 Aug 2001, Jonathan Scott Duff wrote:   
> Have you looked at twiki?  http://TWiki.SourceForge.net/

Hadn't looked at it until your message, although it's referenced
fairly frequently in The Wiki Way (the book I just bought).

TWiki is pretty impressive, but I think perhaps it has some serious
feature creep.  Maybe I'm wrong.  I tend to like packages that have
more gentle administrative learning curves; i.e., simple to set up
and get started with something useful, but with some power to
learn about more advanced features as you go along.  TWiki looks to
me like you really have to know a bit more than the "Wiki Essense"
before you can be productive with it--both as a user and (more
importantly to me at this point) an administrator.

Or, by analogy, WikiWikiWeb (actually WikiBase) reminds me of Post-It
Notes, or a white board--it's pretty obvious how to set them up and
use them.  TWiki reminds me of DocBook.  Of course, there's room
(and need) for both.

At any rate, I think I'm going to continue on with PmWiki for a while--
I'll grant that I'm probably unnecessarily contributing to the incredible
number of versions of WikiClones, but at least I'm not alone.  :-)

Actually, what I really wish is that the basic WikiFormattingRules
were more standardized among the clones, so that author's document
skills would more readily transfer from one Wiki to the next.
But I suspect that the WikiCommunities/WikiClones have fragmented
far too much to unify into a common language.  Kinda like the many
dialects of BASIC that once existed, or even Unix.  Because Wikis
are so easy to implement (and everyone suffers from the delusion that
he/she can build a better one), it'll take some sort of "killer Wiki"
to unify the masses.  (I don't think I know what that Killer Wiki will
be, unfortunately, but I'm still a newbie here.)

There's an amazing contrast here.  The Web is a killer app, but it's
so difficult to write a full-featured browser that very few people/groups
can successfully bring one to market.  Wiki has the potential to be a
killer app, but it's so easy to write a WikiEngine that lots of people
can build their own language and system.  In short, HTML fails as a
lingua franca ("a language of the community") because few groups or
organizations can implement and thus extend the common language;
WikiFormatting will fail as a lingua franca because almost anyone can.

Pm