<rant>
I’m not posting this on Many-to-Many, despite the fact that it’s really a follow up to my other posts there. I don’t want to stir the pot and start a debate right now. I just want to express my extreme frustration with trying to use a wiki, before I explode.
Tonight Dorothea and I started talking about the architecture for the syndication project wiki (pie/echo/atom/whatever). I figured it made all kinds of sense to create wiki pages for our discussion, so I created one for our thoughts on topical organization, and one for our thoughts on audience-focused organization. The file names both included FirstDraft at the end, because I’m accustomed to keeping drafts separate from “production” files.
After I’d edited them a bit, though, I realized that given the nature of the wiki, it made more sense to simply name them with the topics, and let the drafts evolve into the finished products. But it turns out there’s no way to rename a wiki page. Once you’ve picked a name, you’re stuck with it. And while the documentation refers to a DeletePage action, I’ll be damned if I can figure out how to implement it (and I resent having to do so, anyways, since I don’t want to delete it, I want to rename it).
I spent a good hour going through the docs for MoinMoin, which are about as well organized as every other wiki I’ve ever dealt with. No luck. No way to rename, no help on how to delete. I give up. The pages will probably join hundreds of other orphans on the site. Blech.
It seems to me that wikis are designed for people who don’t really care whether their informtion is organized or accessible. People who want to throw stuff out and not worry about what it’s called or what its context is. This is so not how I like dealing with content. I think names matter. I think structured information has value. And I think clear, well-organized documentation is essential.
It’s easy for me to consider using blogs in a class—I can implement them in a way that I’m relatively sure will cause minimal frustration and confusion for my students. But wikis are another story. I can’t see subjecting my students to this level of frustration—with formatting, with renaming, with organizing, with finding information.
</rant>
www.flickr.com
|
