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Wiki markup: the followup

It seems that despite my inflammatory post arguing that wiki markup must die, I haven't yet been tied to a stake and set fire to. In fact, I've received quite a few emails strongly agreeing with my position, and in lieu of working commenting, I'll share a few in this post.

Wiki developers take note: there's limited patience for wiki markup, and a very real marketplace demand for something better!

And the comments:

I absolutely agree with this. I would only dream of using a non-WYSIWYG wiki with geeks. It should be like using Word - but, y'know, collaborative. And simpler. Matt Moore

Love it and totally agree - something I have been grumbling about for ages - even tho it flies in the face of what geeks demand.

The only statement that seemed odd was: "Wikis are about making creating and editing content trivial". I'd be more inclined to say "easy"... Or something, rather than trivial. But I am probably splitting hairs. :)

Russ Weakley

You are my hero. Thank God someone with an audience finally said this.

Couldn't agree more!

Kevin Crossman

I agree wholeheartedly!

If the history of computing, word processing and web has taught engineers and programmers anything it should be that most people don't want to become programmers - and shouldn't be forced to.

I'm a big fan of the WYSIWYG approach.

Craig Thomler

I suspect you're only partly right. WikiMarkup is pretty pointless if you're just writing prose, but thats not all that some Wiki's do.

TWiki for example has an application language that allows the user to define data schema's, and applications directly in TWiki topics.

The other odd thing about your post, is that as far as I know _most_ Opensource Wiki's have wysiwyg editors available - TWiki has several options, starting with TinyMCE as the most robust (and newest addition), Kupu as the previous attempt, and then Wikiwyg and others.

We are also looking towards adding a Wysiwyg editing tool for the application development.

Sven Dowideit

I just want to say thank you for your article on wiki markup. It provides a good summary of why wiki can be a content management issue. Your list of editing requirements is also very useful.

I've discovered myself that wiki content is a deadend. We've been running Mediawiki here at the Council, and unfortunately someone put a great deal of content into it that should really be in HTML pages.

Now I found it is very difficult to automate the process of getting the content out. Even copying and pasting from the browser doesn't work, because it collects the navigation with it. There appears to be many tools and pieces of software available to convert content into a wiki format, but I have not found anything useful to go back the other way. Perhaps people just don't do this?

We're now manually moving the wiki content back into our WCMS, which, being Interwoven Teamsite, will mean it is in XML format at least, and reasonably easy to move into other systems in the future.

Greg Comfort

Posted by jamesr on February 22, 2008 08:22 AM
Categories: Content management