Eh -- I'm not especially fond of what I think of as the Wiki religion. To me, they're tools, to be used as makes sense. I don't love the way the tools have been conflated with a particular use case.
*MediaWiki* is designed as a massively co-operative enterprise, with social controls taking the place of formal ones. That's one valid and common use case for wikis, but far from the only one; indeed, arguably not even the dominant one. It's pretty hard to do successfully -- if you don't have a massive user base, keeping the spammers at bay is difficult.
I suspect that the majority of wikis aren't even remotely that publically-editable (a very large fraction at least require some kind of approval for editing), and many don't look quite so much *like* a wiki. For example, it's quite clear that LJ's public face is more or less entirely built in a wiki: they just choose (correctly, I believe) to not put the wiki-ish features front and center. They're there under the hood, I'm sure, but the average user doesn't see things like edit links.
So it's not so much a matter of matching the tool to the audience, as the look-and-feel you apply to that tool. I want a wiki for my infrastructure, for all the usual reasons: it's easy to edit, I can easily provide editing control to trusted users, it deals with version control, and stuff like that. But to the typical CommYou user, I want it to look more like a web page, because that's what the typical user cares about. They don't care about how this site works, or how one edits it -- they just want to find the answer to their question efficiently, with as little hassle as possible.
(One of the things that's appealing to me about XWiki, the current leading contender, is that it provides immense customization of the look-and-feel. You can have one skin for the administrators and editors, and another for the normal end users. Very sensible, and a feature I might make use of...)
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Date: 2008-03-17 07:39 pm (UTC)*MediaWiki* is designed as a massively co-operative enterprise, with social controls taking the place of formal ones. That's one valid and common use case for wikis, but far from the only one; indeed, arguably not even the dominant one. It's pretty hard to do successfully -- if you don't have a massive user base, keeping the spammers at bay is difficult.
I suspect that the majority of wikis aren't even remotely that publically-editable (a very large fraction at least require some kind of approval for editing), and many don't look quite so much *like* a wiki. For example, it's quite clear that LJ's public face is more or less entirely built in a wiki: they just choose (correctly, I believe) to not put the wiki-ish features front and center. They're there under the hood, I'm sure, but the average user doesn't see things like edit links.
So it's not so much a matter of matching the tool to the audience, as the look-and-feel you apply to that tool. I want a wiki for my infrastructure, for all the usual reasons: it's easy to edit, I can easily provide editing control to trusted users, it deals with version control, and stuff like that. But to the typical CommYou user, I want it to look more like a web page, because that's what the typical user cares about. They don't care about how this site works, or how one edits it -- they just want to find the answer to their question efficiently, with as little hassle as possible.
(One of the things that's appealing to me about XWiki, the current leading contender, is that it provides immense customization of the look-and-feel. You can have one skin for the administrators and editors, and another for the normal end users. Very sensible, and a feature I might make use of...)