Some People Dont Like Wikis

Hm... I just had a very interesting conversation with someone who despises wikis. Apart from the fact that he hates the word wiki and pointing out that they are very text intensive, he stated that he avoids them totally.

: "Wikis seem like an appealing thing ... but as soon as I look at them ... I realize I don't want anything to do with it."

Now, I'm wondering - what percentage of Web-users are avoiding wikis per se?

I'm wondering what the ''concrete' reasons are. I suppose wikis tend to appeal to people who are literate, and comfortable with typing and reading reams of text. Which leaves out large chunks of the population. That's life.

I've had a harder time getting people to like wikis than getting them to use ExtremeProgramming. That says quite a lot about how the "lack of control" and unusual user interface is perceived. Even among the few people who even get what wikis are about, not many actually use them.

I am involved with a project using ZopeApplicationServer, which among other things makes it fast and easy to set up your own wikis (called zWikis - see ZwiKi). Most of the people were not programmers, and initially found it hard to understand and appreciate the benefits of wiki. For a programmer, typing a WikiWord is common and needs no explanation, but for a non-programmer that takes some explaining, and the merits are not obvious.

A couple of people immediately judged wiki to be uninteresting because it looks so rudimentary, and has little graphical appeal. The lack of security and private space was also a real concern.

Some people found it hard to taxonomize wikis in their personal understanding of on-line collaboration tools. For instance, if you think of a wiki as being like a discussion group, you would ask where the threads are shown, how you know who did what, etc. If you think of wiki as a collaborative workspace, you ask how to attach files, keep schedules, give email notifications, etc. Compared to a blog, wikis seem visually bland and structurally confusing. Of course, a wiki is something different from these things, but it's not necessarily easy to get people to understand this at first. People on the particular project realize that there are dozens of collaborative Web technologies out there, and wiki is just one of them, and so naturally they want to know the cost and benefits of wiki. The costs of wiki are low to *programmers*, but are higher to non-programmers. Similarly, the benefits of wiki are not immediately obvious, and seems to require at least a few hours of browsing and experimenting with wiki before you get it. For some, a few hours is just too much of a cost for such a weird technology.

Yet, now, almost everyone on the project has come to really like wikis, and almost everyone uses it for something. The ease and speed with which you can edit and change pages appeals to some. It's also easy to experiment with HTML (in zWiki you can use HTML, or StructuredText, or a combination), and wiki is a fast and simple prototyping system. Some have even realized that they can create their own wiki-structures using WikiBadges, and have gotten quite excited about some of the possibilities, and so are writing utilities to extend zwiki. Based on this experience, I'd speculate that, given enough time, most people can appreciate the benefits of wiki, but the benefits are not as immediately obvious as those of, say, a blog or threaded discussion group.

CategoryWiki