[Discuss] wiki suggestions?

[eric.chadbourne at gmail.com (Eric Chadbourne)]

On 01/31/2012 09:24 PM, Richard Pieri wrote:
> 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.

Both of your responses caught my attention more than any others.  I only 
didn't respond because I wasn't sure what to say.

>
> 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.

While I have great respect for the information you provide on the list I 
could not possibly disagree with you more in my particular situation. 
The very large amount of educators using wikispaces would probably 
disagree with you to a certain extent as well.  At my $day_job we have 
teachers.  They don't have research assistants like Harvard doing lots 
of heavy lifting for them.  They have to do everything for the class. 
And quite often, as it the case at a low paying non-profit, different 
teachers have to take somebody else's class.  Maybe it's turn over, 
maybe it's scheduling.  Shit, they might not even know the subject!  And 
a billion '.docs' doesn't help anybody.  As an example tomorrow morning 
I have to get my ass up real early and teach a computer class for a very 
large local medial establishment.  A real teacher made the course.  I 
read it over and found a few technical errors.  Corrected them, put the 
whole course on wikipsaces the other day.  Not too difficult.  And 
wikispaces does have export functionality.  I haven't tested it yet 
though.  But hey it wouldn't be too hard to scrape their site and put 
the courses into any format I want.  Network storage is a freaking 
nightmare that I have experienced at a couple of companies.  It is not a 
way to manage information.  Wikispaces might suck balls.  I don't know. 
  Trying them out now. If they do suck balls I'll just write my own if 
something doesn't exist that we need.  If that situation happens I'll 
try to recruit you off list to help us!

Thanks again,
Eric C