Thoughts On A Personal Wiki My partner and I are running a personal wiki. We're both fairly prolific writers, and we're funneling that output to this wiki. Running one now is making me think about wikis more.
>From a technical perspective, I wish we had the Tracy-style "editor of choice in the text box". I'm a wiki-gnome in Wikipedia parlance, which means I pretty much only correct spelling and grammar and make certain limited structural improvements to an article. But now that I'm creating whole paragraphs of text, I'm noticing that wiki markup is really not what I'd prefer to be using. Sometimes I'd like to be using Markdown, and sometimes I'd like to have OpenOffice controlling the text box. Why can't I just highlight text and hit Ctrl-B? (And why do I have to switch to a text box at all? I'd like to edit right there on the page and see my changes on the fly. But that's not such a big priority for me.) >From a text-technical perspective, the wiki model kind of assumes that you're going to have articles with definite, discrete, names. But on this personal level, I have all sorts of things to say that don't necessarily pigeon hole so well. I may have an article about my favorite authors and then an article about the kinds of books I like to read, and there's definite overlap. Should they be combined? Should there be a cross reference link at the top of each article? I don't want to spend a whole lot of time on structure. I'm confident that I will develop a personal style of use with my wiki, and that it will grow vertically as well as horizontally. I'm working on it. >From a social perspective, if I create a piece of text then I have some personal claim to it, and an expectation that it will be viewed as something that is mine. Should my partner and I be editing each others' work? Spelling and grammar can be easily overlooked. But structural changes might affect content. Changing the content outright would be... just... not right. But this goes against the very grain of a wiki. One last thing. From a user perspective, my partner is using the wiki for keeping track of upcoming events, and I think she's just fighting an uphill battle on that one. A wiki is *not* suited for such a thing. I'll let her discover that on her own. Anyone else have any experience with using a wiki for non-reference purposes? -todd -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
