New Wiki Implelementation Struggles – To structure or not?.
I am working on an implementation of several wikis. One is my personal wiki which runs on my laptop. I’ve often written about it here. Things are by and large going very well. I am also involved in my team’s implementation of a wiki.
So far, the biggest struggle has been related to how much structure to put in place. We are using TWiki which is incredibly powerful. The trouble is that is has this neat capability to associate ‘forms’ with topics in a wiki that allow you to categorize and add formal data fields.
These are incredibly handy in building formal pages that group like topics, summarizing group thoughts, voting, etc… But i can’t help feeling that it does break the wikiness of the wiki.
What I think we need is somesort of best practices regarding categorization. I don’t want to go so far that we lose the benefits of easy editing, dynamic categories based on the text of topics, etc. At the same time, I do need to create places in the wiki where things are summarized / grouped automatically …
Perhaps these questions are unique to Intranet deployments and the discussion belongs in Bill Seitz’s Intranet Wiki forum. Any thoughts on this would be greatly appreciated.
[Ed Taekema – Road Warrior Collaboration]