The virtues of simplicity

[jducoeur]

I sometimes regret choosing the UseMod codebase for ProWiki. It's very spare, with none of the bells and whistles and fancy graphics of more modern wikis -- no built-in programming language, or WYSIWYG editing, or anything like that. I suspect that that is hindering anyone else from picking it up, which is a pity, since I think I'm onto a core idea that is going to become very important in the next few years. (Editing pages online is nice, but editing data online is really useful, and ProWiki's semi-structured approach provides a nice compromise of power vs. flexibility. It's the tip of a very big iceberg, I believe.)

That said, it's really nice to be able to edit my LARP from my cell phone. Those simple ProWiki pages are easy enough to render that they look decent on the phone's screen, and since they only take a few K per page, it doesn't eat into my meager Internet budget too much. So I proved, while waiting in the doctor's office this morning, that I'm entirely able to work in the wiki environment from pretty much anywhere.

Now if only it wasn't such a pain in the ass to type the '[' character from the Treo's keypad...

Comments

[goldsquare.livejournal.com]

since I think I'm onto a core idea that is going to become very important in the next few years. (Editing pages online is nice, but editing data online is really useful,

If ever someone was going to merge two technologies as disparate as wikis and spreadsheets, VisiCalc creator Dan Bricklin might well be the person for the job.

[jducoeur]

Interesting. I'm more focused on textual data with freeform XML-ish schemas, but I'm not surprised that others are taking the idea in other directions. My gut instinct is that it's steam-engine time for these sorts of easy online data-management tools, and that we're going to see an explosion of them pretty steadily over the next three years...

[(Anonymous)]

"over the next three years..."

Why, what happens four years from now?

Wiki are indeed interesting things. I often wonder if ESPN uses a kind of change aware Wiki that allows for up-to-the-second ticker updates, site updates, cell-phone alerts, email generation, fantasy league stat updates, etc. Look no further than your mainstream sports news outlet to be pushing the technology envelope.

- Eric

[jducoeur]

Why, what happens four years from now?

In all seriousness -- these things typically proceed in waves. The initial idea is followed by everyone catching on, which is followed by a period of wild experimentation, which is followed by a consolidation phase as the technology settles down a bit before the next big innovation comes along. I believe that the general wiki concept of "collaborative online editing" is about to his the wild experimentation phase. And yes -- my guess is that it'll probably take about three years to mine out the low-hanging fruit there...

[(Anonymous)]

Interesting. The wiki has been around since 1995 and it has indeed evolved a little bit - you'll see wikis on sourceforge, and there are many wiki communities. I believe that the LA Times tried a wiki - and pulled it because of pollution.

The problem with wikis is that they can be so easily defaced. Even with user registration.

[jducoeur]

Yep. I've encountered that myself -- I pulled public modification for my wikis after some Russian spammers took the main ProWiki site and completely rewrote it as wikispam. (Of course, that's been illustrating some interesting things to me: in particular, that wiki technology is deeply useful even if only one person is able to work on it. The ability to modify my data from anywhere is one of the key reasons I'm using it for all my LARP writing now.)

That said, I think that Wikipedia is demonstrating that the problem is controllable if you have a user base that is committed to the upkeep of the place, and sufficient tools to recover easily. And I think it's early days yet in that particular war: people are still figuring out what those tools are.

And yes, it's taken a while for wikis to really catch on. I mean, ProWiki is built on an evolution from Ward Cunningham's original codebase, and that's notably old stuff. But most people didn't really notice the idea until Wikipedia made a splash, and they're only now realizing how generally applicable it is.

None of this is surprising -- it took six years (1989 to 1995) for the Web to catch on big, and even longer for email. It's pretty rare for a technology to catch the eye of the public immediately, especially if it was created at the grass-roots level: unless you've got a big advertising budget, it doesn't really get noticed widely until the word of mouth has been percolating for years...

[(Anonymous)]

I guess so... .Net is still awash in a virtual wasteland.