On Sat, October 13, 2007 9:06 pm, Todd Walton wrote: > Thoughts On A Personal Wiki > > My partner and I are running a personal wiki. We're both fairly > prolific writers, and we're funneling that output to this wiki. > Running one now is making me think about wikis more. > >>From a technical perspective, I wish we had the Tracy-style "editor of > choice in the text box". I'm a wiki-gnome in Wikipedia parlance, > which means I pretty much only correct spelling and grammar and make > certain limited structural improvements to an article. But now that > I'm creating whole paragraphs of text, I'm noticing that wiki markup > is really not what I'd prefer to be using. Sometimes I'd like to be > using Markdown, and sometimes I'd like to have OpenOffice controlling > the text box. Why can't I just highlight text and hit Ctrl-B? > > (And why do I have to switch to a text box at all? I'd like to edit > right there on the page and see my changes on the fly. But that's not > such a big priority for me.) > >>From a text-technical perspective, the wiki model kind of assumes that > you're going to have articles with definite, discrete, names. But on > this personal level, I have all sorts of things to say that don't > necessarily pigeon hole so well. I may have an article about my > favorite authors and then an article about the kinds of books I like > to read, and there's definite overlap. Should they be combined? > Should there be a cross reference link at the top of each article? I > don't want to spend a whole lot of time on structure. > > I'm confident that I will develop a personal style of use with my > wiki, and that it will grow vertically as well as horizontally. I'm > working on it. > >>From a social perspective, if I create a piece of text then I have > some personal claim to it, and an expectation that it will be viewed > as something that is mine. Should my partner and I be editing each > others' work? Spelling and grammar can be easily overlooked. But > structural changes might affect content. Changing the content > outright would be... just... not right. But this goes against the > very grain of a wiki. > > One last thing. From a user perspective, my partner is using the wiki > for keeping track of upcoming events, and I think she's just fighting > an uphill battle on that one. A wiki is *not* suited for such a > thing. I'll let her discover that on her own. > > Anyone else have any experience with using a wiki for non-reference > purposes? > > -todd >
Yeah, I've used one to keep notes and tips for myself. I also instituted one at work to keep process notes, and it was a big success EXCEPT I couldn't hack in a way to interface with an SCM archive tool (perforce for us). If you keep your manifest or build procedures on a wiki, then when a build is done you have to be able to check in the current wiki docs and version label them. That's first on my wish list. -- Lan Barnes SCM Analyst Linux Guy Tcl/Tk Enthusiast Biodiesel Brewer -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
