Wiki’s

[#1]

Internally at PlusNet, we make use of Wiki's for storing some of our internal documentation and notes. I recently had to complete some documentation within the Wiki, regarding the new webmail platform that was built.

You might thing this seemed like a simple task, which admittedly, if I was wanting to just do a completely plain text page - but I needed to include some markup, including some internal links, some plain text and some emphasis. However, I was soon to realise that this wasn't the case...

Being someone who generally uses HTML and Forum Software, I'd have expected to have <b> or [b] to make text bold... but no, MediaWiki makes use of '''bold''' to produce bold text. Now, it may just be me, but isn't that rather unintuitive? Given the popularity of Wiki's, maybe it is just me and I'm "set in my ways" given the popularity (and usefulness) of site's like WikiPedia - where many other people seem to keep cope with them fine.

[#2]

Would you like tomato sauce with your wiki-markup?

[#3]

I completely agree - The wiki interface has advantages, but it is gash to use unless you are really into it. Despite the negatives, I'm a fan as wysiwyg (What you see is what you get) input boxes, although done badly they can be slow and irritating. At the end of the day, when I write a document, more often than not I write it in Word. What I then want is to be able to transfer that to an on-line repository with minimum effort. Be that cut and paste or a Macro, I don't mind. At the moment, there is no perfect way though. Cut and Pasting from word into a wordpress blog entry for example produces horrible formatting and lots of unnecessary code. That probably won't stop me doing it, but it's annoying. Ian

[#4]

It's a lot about what you know though. Ask a regular wikipedia contributor to use 'intuitive' html and they'll probably just stare at you blankly. An intereting one I saw the other day is Markdown. It does a relatively good job at creating a markup that, when viewed as plain text, looks like plain text.