Writing with Wikis

For nearly a month now I’ve been trying wikis with the co-moderators to-be for BAW 2006. I’ve tried my hand at pbwiki and not felt comfortable in that environment at all…   Daf is definitely enthusiastic about them, but many of the others share my feelings. Here’s what I’m not happy about:

1) At wikis, everybody can do everything, without even informing the author of a text if they’ll have it deleted. Besides, people can make contributions and then readers will never distinguish who’s said what (unless they remember to “sign” their additions, or readers   take the trouble to click on “Edit this page”). I find this confusing as a reader, and rather “threatening” as a writer.

2) What’s worse, there’s no easy way to keep track of changes made (again, unless you take the trouble to click on “Edit this page”). If I’ve posted something, I’d need to go back regularly to check nobody if somebody has made changes to it. I’d like a wiki to notify me by email every time a change is made (as Webcollaborator would do, pity it was unstable; BTW, it notified comments, but not changes to the documents either!)

3) I hate dealing with the formatting conventions, what is known as “Wiki syntax”. Yet, at Wikipedia, I can read: “Some recent wiki engines … allow ”WYSIWYG” editing, usually by means of JavaScript or an ActiveX control that translates graphically entered formatting instructions such as “bold” and “italics” into the corresponding HTML tags.” I’d definitely like to try that!

Ironic: while objecting to wikis, I’m making use of one as a source of knowledge!!!  Guess that means I need to keep exploring this tool!

Gladys

Originally posted at my LiveJournal (now closed) on Dec 21, 2005

Appearances are…

I read at the BBC News:

Internet users make up their minds about the quality of a website in the blink of an eye, a study shows…The researchers also believe that these quickly-formed first impressions last because of what is known to psychologists as the “halo effect”. If people believe a website looks good, then this positive quality will spread to other areas, such as the website’s content. Since people like to be right, they will continue to use the website that made a good first impression, as this will further confirm that their initial decision was a good one.

What a challenge for humble blogs like mine! It means we bloggers should devote as much attention as possible to layout, since we won’t have much chance of showing our content otherwise… Another reason to favour blogs and wikis with really user-friendly interfaces over more “technical” ones, especially when choosing what to recommend to our students…