[Discuss] wiki suggestions?

[Richard Pieri]

On Jan 30, 2012, at 4:22 PM, Bill Horne wrote:
> 
> It's almost never going to be the program or environment or online tool that /you/ are most comfortable with, but it /will/ be the one that your users have bought into, and therefore the one they will use. Over time, as the tradeoffs of non-optimal first-pass choices become obvious, you'll be able to guide the group toward more robust and more easily maintained solutions, but if you start out by _dictating_ a course of action, it won't work.

This.

What Bill says here is why I asked about publishing vs. collaboration (and I'm still awaiting an answer).  Saying "we need a wiki" is just going to cause you problems if you really need something else.

Wikis are good for collaborating.  If you have physicists at MIT, Fermilab, CERN and J-PARC working on the same research then a wiki is a good way for them to collaborate.  This is the kind of writing that wikis were designed to manage.

On the other hand, wikis are *terrible* static document repositories.  If you have a Lab full of professors, each with a their own syllabus that needs to be distributed to students, then a wiki is the worst way I can think of to do it.  The reason is simple: these faculty cannot just put their documents into a wiki.  They need to be rewritten or converted to the wiki format, and that is a gigantic waste of time for a slew of one-offs.  Getting those documents back out can be even more painful unless you set them up with file uploads for the static documents in which case the wiki itself is a waste of resources.  You all would be better off with a basic web server fronting some kind of networked storage.

--Rich P.