[Zope-dev] Wiki Pain

[Toby Dickenson]

Since the beginning of this year DC have moved alot of debate and
discussion out of mailing lists, and in to Wikis.
http://www.zope.org/WikiCentral/FrontPage lists most Zope Wikis. Does
anyone else find Wikis to be far less convenient than a good old
mailing list?

Ive been annoyed by the following characteristics:

1. No threading. On several occasions I have made comments in a Wiki
that were subsequently ignored - I guess because they got lost in the
mass of other edits. Recently people have been adding edits to the end
of the page: This makes it easier to keep track of changes, but harder
to catch up on a discussion when you come to it for the first time. 

2. No personal replies. On several occasions I would have liked to
email a comment personally to another contributer, but they didnt
leave an email address.

3. No update notification. The one time I was update to keep up with a
Wiki discussion involved the other participant always manually
emailing a change notification.

4. Hard to keep track of many Wikis: Each wiki has its own 'whats
changed' page, but even those are too coarse.

5. Too easy to fragment a discussion. On several occasions I have
thought that a discussion had dried up, only to find out later on that
it had moved to another page.

6. Too easy to miss the creation of a Wiki. On several occasions
people have posted comments on zopedev questioning why noone has
commented on their page - Noone knew it was there. This is
particularly a problem because Wikis tend to get created sooner than a
new mailing list would do, out of the desire to capture all discussion
inside that Wiki. Mailing lists only tend to get created once there is
enough traffic to justify them, and by then everyone is aware of the
topic.

7. Too easy to loose content. On several occasions I have been unable
to add a comments to a Wiki, either because www.zope.org would not let
me login, or because its database was full.

8. Editing is painful. I have to use the browsers text field, and the
whole Wiki page has to make a round trip with every change.

9. I never get the structured text quoting of python source right
first time.

10. There are too many empty pages, because someone has clicked on a ?
next to word that happened to be a WikiName. Useful pages lie hidden
behind a sea of links to empty pages.

rant ends.



Toby Dickenson
tdickenson@geminidataloggers.com