http://wikidot.com
Wikis can be fun to use.
When I first encountered wikis I thought that I had found the answer to a problem that had been troubling me for awhile about making web pages. Among the chief complaints I had heard about web pages and making them, while I would be helping a user get oriented to the Internet, was how much they dreaded having to deal with HTML and how much of a hassle formatting text was.
Of course, this was when WYSIWYG editors and built-in online design tools were still in the early stages of development and collaboration on web sites was mostly limited to email submission forms. Wikis offered the possibility that a non-expert could log into a site and create something.
Now it’s years later and wikis are ubiquitous. However, the idea that they are for ‘just anybody’ never really took off the way I had envisioned. They still require learning sometimes obscure markup languages and the themes can sometimes be quite ugly.
Where they can be extraordinarily useful, they do very well. As a place for users and developers to develop tutorials and user guides collaboratively, wikis are without many challengers. Almost every new online project includes a wiki for documentation.
A few examples of wikis that work:
By no means comprehensive, these are just a few wikis that I use regularly.
For my own personal, private use, I don’t really use wikis much. My writing tends to be more directed without the sidetrails and loops that occur when a wiki editor is your main tool, usually because by the time I’m committing to page, I’ve already done most of the structural work. Emacs provides for wiki modes and wiki type modes with automatic CamelCase link creation and the like, but it also has many other and more powerful tools for that type of writing.
For blog posting, Zemanta and other tools are very useful and help me post without having to resort to any markup language other than HTML, which I am familiar enough with now to write comfortably with.
My hosting account includes a Mediawiki style wiki that is auto installable. I installed it and did some basic configuration, you can find it here at http://donaldlindsay.net/wiki .
Wikidot.com, however, offers an interface that I like better, so I may be linking to that for content that I can’t make work in Wordpress, you can find my wikidot pages here at http://donlindsay.wikidot.com .
If I find that I’m using the wiki alot, I’ll fix the links for a more seamless experience, but for now, I think this arrangement will work.
