So what if documents actually were better than wikis?
November 24th, 2010
That should stir up some controversy. But that was exactly what we thought when we read the blog post of Alexander Brütt about Wiki vs. Documents. In this blog, the author makes his point about what are exactly the advantages of documents. Let's examine some of Alexander's points:
- Documents can be send
Valid point of course. Except from mailing somebody a link to the url (a good habit we have been promoting all along) there is no real way to send somebody a copy of a page. You could of course make a pdf-print and send the resulting pdf. But I agree that is somewhat of a hassle. That at least gives us an idea for a new feature on our wordonwiki product backlog. - Documents can be read offline
Again a valid point, but in this day and age of ubiquitous internet, ipads and smart phones, that becomes less of a problem. What can you do if you are offline anyway. There have been some ideas floating in the office to keep a cached set of documents on a client. That would limit download time when the copy on your local machine is the same as the one you are downloading. We could image some offline mode switch to at least view those cached pages. - Documents are a standardized storage medium.
Strange point. If you would call .doc and .docx standards, there are Microsoft specific to make sure. Who would care about this anyhow. 'Send me the doc' in today's business environment most likely means 'Send me the Word file'. - The editor for documents named Word 2010 is the best document editor on this planet
Oh my God, music in my ears. Yes that is exactly what we have been trying to tell the world. Kudos for Alexander to make this point to beautifully. Kudos to ourselves to make this an advantage of the WordonWiki product :-) - Documents can switch their file format as desired. A wiki cannot really do that.
Yes, true... But why would I want to change the wiki format.
Our view is best summarized by following equation:
the document == the page == its history == its url
In a wiki, the document is synonym for the page. The wiki page has everything contained in it: its history (complete with revert possibilities) and its unique location indicated by the url. The document has all these things separated out. The historical versions of the document are other documents and once you 'send it' it is no longer unique.
Please add comments if you have thoughts about this comparison between documents and pages.