Wiki's haven't grown up yet
March 16th, 2010
Searching for some competitive wiki overviews, the top sites that google showed were:
What is strange about these overviews is that both use the product's programming language as its main or primary structure. Who would want to know that? I can understand the IT guy having to install it is wondering what prerequisite libraries to install, but no end-user, manager or project leader should be bothered by the programming language of the tool.
For us that is one more sign that wikis and wiki usage haven't grown up yet to meet the challenges of the corporate world. These products were created by the tech community and are still trying to grow beyond that. Up to this day, we are confronted with people arguing why anyboy would need Wysiwig editing in a wiki. Luckily most wiki tools have now a wysiwyg option in their offering.
Not to be underestimated is the effect of wikipedia. Wikipedia has such a status that when people talk about 'putting it in THE wiki', they implicitely mean 'wikipedia'. As a result, there is an huge number of mediawiki installations. Installed out of the box, mediawiki has no support for wysiwyg.
Looking at the advantages a wiki can bring in most teams, it's a pity we are still struggling with the 'techie' image of the wiki usage. We talked to many people and all too often you get the same complaints: 'If only our business users would be using the wiki', 'Why can't we get the people from the other departments on the wiki?'
One of the greatest resources on wiki selection is http://www.wikimatrix.org. The site offers great features to compare the different wikis and we are happy to say the programming language is just another feature you can use to compare wikis.
If you got on this blog post using google search on 'wiki' and 'programming language', we won't dissappoint you with the graph below as it is currently shown on wikimatrix (look for an up to date version on http://www.wikimatrix.org/statistic/Programming+Languages)
Post new comment