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December 06, 2005
Wikis Suck For Serious Business
We've been kicking around using wikis as ad-hoc KM/collaboration tools for the firm. My boss and I discussed it at a bit of depth on a fine sunny day this last summer as we drove to one of our other offices. We both concluded that, as they stand, wikis are not ready for the sort of use we want out of them.
He made two points. One, current wiki UI is not lawyer-friendly. WikiWords are stupid, especially to a profession who trades in fine wordings. HTML-like markup and syntax are usable for only those who are already geeky enough to know the real deal. Once you can get the UI of a wiki to the level of Word, then we can talk. Hmmm, I smell open source project idea. Two, wikis are knowledge sinkholes. Getting data into them is kinda easy (see One), but getting data out of them is hard. I know Jotspot is working on that, for one, but when you are trading in PDFs and Word docs, XML export doesn't cut it (at least not currently).
I made a single point that sort of gets at both of his. Wikis are great for ad-hoc arrangement and re-arrangement of data, but they don't respect existing data. And with 2-million-plus documents in dozens of formats sitting in our document management system, we need to respect existing data. Wikis will be useful to the extent they enable us to re-use, remix, reorganize, review, and extend those documents. What is needed is a wiki that is created, edited, and saved in Word.
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Posted by Noel at 05:38 PM
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Hi,
Given your post, I think you should take a look at Confluence (http://www.atlassian.com/confluence/). It think it might answer a lot of the complaints you have about wikis:
1. No WikiWords (unless you want them)
2. It has a decent Wysiwyg editor. It's not as nice as word, but at least the lawyers would be on familiar ground.
3. Finding and exporting data is easy. Confluence will search attached documents (Word, PDF, etc) and display hits in the website search results. And any page or collection of pages can be exported as PDF.
Confluence does a great job of dealing with existing data. Your Word documents go in and they live on the wiki server (instead of your email account) and they can be edited with a permanent and recoverable version history.
Anyway, give it a shot. And if you have any questions, please give me a shout.
Cheers,
jonathan@atlassian.com
Posted by: Jonathan Nolen at December 6, 2005 08:14 PM
Granted, I work for a company that sells Wikis (this is my disclaimer), but I agree partially. In ADR situations, I've seen, however, Kwiki installations pop up quite a bit. Kwiki pages can be exported as PDF, and Wikiwyg, a WYSIWYG plugin, makes it easy to paste Word into a Wiki or to write without even caring about Wiki Markup or HTML.
Yeah, I was kind of befuddled by Wikis in legal environments myself. WikiWords are an abomination (I don't want to refer to my client as ClientJaneDoe, she's Mrs. Jane Doe), and having to scroll around to see who changed what in ninety print pages of verbiage is a horror. Modern Wikis address this by allowing WYSIWYG editing, have excellent "diff" features, and by moving away from WikiWords. And instead of a sales pitch (hey, Atlassian, you're using Technorati, eh? :), which I believe has no place on a blog like this, let me link to Kwiki and the WIKIWYG stuff:
http://www.kwiki.org and http://www.wikiiwyg.net
Posted by: Jonas M Luster at December 7, 2005 05:01 PM