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Wiki == horrible documentation

I'm sure it won't make me more popular by saying it, but I think the Wiki craze among developers is nothing to get excited about. Yeah, it's neat that you can implement such a system, but it seems to breed useless content.

For example, I noticed that FreeTextBox released a new version, so I thought I'd check it out. I downloaded it, but went back to it in a test project on a remote server, where I did not have the original zip (and therefore, not the help files or code samples). I thought, hey, no problem, I'll just check the docs on the site. What a waste of time that turned out to be.

I went to the installation page looking to see what the @Register directive was (seeing as how I had no idea what the proper namespace was). Nope, not there. After looking around some more, I eventually landed on a page with nothing on it at all, and no navigation to get me to something useful.

I'm not a hater. From what I can tell, this version of the control is extra cool, and the price is right. And yes, I'm sure someone wants to comment that I should have had the stuff in the zip file with me, but I didn't. I don't think it's that ridiculous to expect that you'd actually find meaningful documentation for a product, free or not, on the site from which it came from.

I've yet to see any Wiki evolve into something useful. The concept has been around for a long time, and for awhile you'd think that blogging .NET developers saw it as something that would change the world. But here's the thing... Having run sites that encouraged the contribution of content from anyone on the planet since 1998 or so, I can tell you from experience that this kind of Utopian everyone-can-edit idea won't ever work. You can't even trust people to behave in a discussion forum or in blog comments, and you want to have a site anyone can edit content on? Without some kind of moderation, it's useless, and if moderation is to be practical, it has to be of structured data.

So tell me why I'm so uninformed.
Posted: Dec 13 2004, 12:45 AM by Jeff | with 4 comment(s)
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Comments

Julien Couvreur said:

I use a wiki for taking personal notes and keep them semi-organized. It's much better than note taking app I had written ;-P
In terms of succesful wikis, you should check out wikipedia.
# December 13, 2004 4:25 AM

Imran Koradia said:

I had the same kind of frustration when looking for documentation for some other tool (I don't remember which one right now..) But yes - was a similar case which took me to some wiki site which had a whole bunch of topics but nothing in there :( Anyway, I still think wikis can be quite useful. I find this wiki - www.pinvoke.net - particularly useful and well implemented.
# December 13, 2004 9:26 AM

Jason Dossett said:

I know it's 'against what wiki's are about', but I think if applied in a controlled manner, they could be pretty useful. We're looking into either extending flexwiki or rolling something custom to add wikis as a first class citizen to SharePoint. Team collaboration on content could be pretty valuable. After all these years, it's still hard to have some kind of realtime collaboration with office documents.
# December 13, 2004 9:45 AM

Shannon J Hager said:

I agree with Jason, a wiki + controlled edit access = good.

The wikipedia is an example of a good wiki but that is largely due to the huge number of users patrolling for bad entries and vandalism, something few (no?) other wikis seem to have.

Take the .Text wiki. the only way to get anywhere on that thing is to search google's cache or the "recent changes" page. The home page is usually just today's curse word.

# December 13, 2004 6:09 PM
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