The Wiki Way: I hate it, I love it
There are things I dislike and like about Wikis. I think none of my arguments are new, but I wanted to collect them for reference nevertheless.
The design decision to make Wiki nodes by forcing LotsOfRidiculousMisSpellings on the user is short-sighted, to say the least. Here's why:
- It looks ugly, at least to me.
- It won't work at all in languages that don't have the concept of capital letters in their scripts. This includes Chinese, Japanese and Korean. All of these languages are quite common on today's Internet. The default style of WikiWords with its English-centric design slams the door in their faces.
- It won't work with acronyms (XML, HTTP, SARS). This is a major problem for technical Wikis. Is it xML or XmL? Do you have to spell it out, like HyperTextTransferProtocol? If so, without looking it up, would you know that SARS stands for "Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrom" and do you know how to spell that?
- While words with capital letters look cute in English, because there are so few of them, other languages may have different rules: In German, we spell nouns with a capital letter, period. Verbs spelled that way will make the author look like a dyslexic.
- You'll run into all kinds of problems with languages that use affixes or inflection as grammatical features. Consider the German "WikiWörter" (WikiWords). Now you want to use that in a phrase: "Ich habe ein Problem mit WikiWörter." (I have a problem with WikiWords). Sounds odd? That's because it's broken German. You're supposed to use the dative case here, "WikiWörtern". But that would be a new node. Languages that attach suffixes to words as grammatical markers have similar problems. This includes Turkish, Finnish, Japanese... no, wait, Japanese doesn't have capital letters, so they can't go the WikiWay anyway.
To sum it up: if you are lucky enough to use a language that supports WikiWords in the first place, you can produce
aesthetically unpleasant writeups which will only slightly make you look like a six-year-old without a clue about grammar and spelling. Probably not the best way you could present yourself and your projects on the Internet.
It's not only the spelling that annoys me. But I have to admit that other points I dislike about Wikis are generic problems about collaborative editing. Every Wikis is quickly filled with clutter and quality generally varies too much. Also, two of the most useful Wiki projects, Wikipedia and everything2 did away with the StupidSpellingIssue.
What do I like about Wikis? Taking part in a private software project (currently in the design phase) I fell in love with Wikis again. It just works for this kind of stuff. You can bring people together to discuss the design in a very convenient manner and produce the project documentation along the way. Great. It also seems to work for these guys. So, Wikis have their place, they are a great tool for some problems, they just won't solve all of them.
Posted by jens at August 16, 2003 09:44 PM
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