Comments on: On Wikis and Living Documents

By: crisper

crisper — Sun, 16 Aug 2009 01:34:56 +0000

I would add a third flaw to Google docs, which is that (at least so far as I know; I don't use it myself so maybe I'm wrong) it's not extensible and customizable and feature-alterable by you, its user. Most wikis I've used have some means by which its users can add (or remove) functionality from it, bolting on security or more sophisticated formatting or mathematical operations or whatever else. Does Google let you plug arbitrary you-only code into their system for your own documents?

By: maeuschen

maeuschen — Sat, 15 Aug 2009 15:09:57 +0000

We use MediaWiki at Qualcomm for Engineering documentation. It has been a long uphill battle to move the older designers off of Word or FrameMaker(!), but generally everyone agrees this is easier to maintain in the long run.

By: jgcr

jgcr — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 19:53:38 +0000

I have lived this pain, from the suit side (more or less, designers are sort of in the middle) in 500-developer projects and now, in a startup.

Wikis do seem to be the least-bad option. They don't handle mockup changes nearly as well as text changes, and for me, that's a problem. Leads to hacks where I have to remember to point to a specific rev of the wiki rather than "latest" so I don't screw up and start changing things under the engineers inadvertantly.

In my teeny startup, that's OK, because I'm training the engineers to just talk to me while they're building, which is the best method for small teams in any case.

Back in big-company land --- it's going to be a while before the suits drop Word/Sharepoint/etc. And I've been on that side and carefully writing up spec change + documentation of spec change at 4am, oh yes.

At eBay it worked, but only because we had GODDESS-LIKE project managers. Word + G-L PjMs > Wikis with poor/no PjMs. I mean these ladies (and they were mostly ladies) basically had all of the specs in their head, as well as the whole roadmap, and a list of change requests ordered properly. And every engineers phone number, IM, and favorite food. They were insane.

I miss them.

By: cheezaddict

cheezaddict — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 18:49:14 +0000

Here we're going to Sybase's PowerDesigner and previously have used IBM's Rational Rose. It's an interesting tool but has a lot of the same issues as you mentioned Word having, and Word can be imported/exported from it. Have you seen these and what is your opinion of them?

By: mr_chip

mr_chip — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 18:35:02 +0000

You and the Confluence guys should hang out sometime. Confluence plays like it was specifically designed to address all of the shortcomings you've mentioned, up to and including allowing users to import/export word documents as actual pages in the Wiki.

I use it extensively to build portals for non-technical users on a regular basis, complete with includes, rss feeds, etc. My boss loves that he can upload a properly-formatted spreadsheet with the current on-call schedule, and the next 4 weeks' calendar is updated automatically on the team homepage.

It's really fantastic for exactly the sort of thing you're talking about.

By: asynja

asynja — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 18:33:08 +0000

I love it, however we have been through 5 different wiki platforms (seriously) and the people around here just don't GET IT. It is really frustrating when you try to make their lives easier and they fully resist.