Twiki: The Girl Everyone Loves But Me
It seems like the whole world is in love with Julia Roberts. To be honest, I’ve never been quite sure why. Everyone’s had this experience. There’s that someone that the whole world seems to adore. Except you. You just can’t see it. You don’t know what they see, and you’re pretty sure the whole world has just gone crazy.
My Julia Roberts of the technical world is Twiki.
An “Web-based collaboration platform.” Conceptually, it sounds like a good enough idea. A simple way for multiple people to create online documentation. There’s an “Edit” link on every page. It’s easy to create links via WikiWords. And there are text formating abound, such as *foo* to generate foo.
So why don’t I like it? In pratice it just falls apart. The documentation has no structure. Just a series of links listing here and there… all over. Yes, it’s kinda like the Internet. But imagine trying to find information on the Web without a good seach engine, like Google or Yahoo. Kinda frighting, no?
Don’t the WikiWords help? No really. Imagine if your online technical documentation was reduced to AOL Keywords. Sound like a good idea? Bingo. It’s not.
If you think it’s an exgeration, let’s try a simple test. Who will know better about the working of Twiki, better than the Twiki folks themselves? So head on over to twiki.org yourself, and try to answer this simple question:
A TwikiWeb clearly suggest a hierarchy along the lines of:
Twiki -> Support -> Webhome
What if you want to further classify under Webhome. E.g. say we wanted:
OurSite -> Engineering -> OurTeam -> ProductFoo
and
OurSite -> Engineering -> OurTeam -> ProductBar
How do you implement that? Is it even possible?
Or, try a simpler question: Part of the text formatting simplifies the creation of tables to using pipes:
| HeaderA | HeaderB | HeaderC |
| Data1 | Data2| Data3|
Of course, like every table that lack cellpadding, or setting of the width tag, etc. the resultant table just looks awful. So how do we add something as cellpadding attribute?
My point here is that even the Twiki authors can’t maintain a coherant Twiki site (the very purpose for which it was designed), then how can we mere mortals?
