Wiki switches to MSWord and Open Office
March 1st, 2009
This would probably make a ’scary’ headline for many. A recent post over at Simon Goh’s blog made an interesting comparison on how editing a wiki and authoring a document differs. Simon correctly argues that following MSWord features hinders a widespread wiki adoption:
- Too much options to indicate changes:
- Comments
- Revisions
- Strikethrough
- Highlighting
- Any combination of the above
- No RSS
- A ‘document’ has an owner, so other people are less inclined to modify it.
I would add following topics:
- No easy ‘read’ feature
- No easy ’show history’ feature
- Cumbersome navigation between ‘wiki pages’, which could actually be ‘documents’.
Yet, wouldn’t we all want to combine the richer editing features with the community aspects of a Wiki. Of course, as we are building exactly this combination, we strongly believe in it.
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