Wiki -- Why?

Posted by Chris Murtland
Sep 2, 2006 at 03:53 PM

Daly,

Think of Zoot and BrainStorm - two unique programs that have a lot of power for harnessing and working with information. Both are plain text, not WYSIWYG. Unless you work in a field that is highly visual (photography, design, etc.), chances are that most of your information is textual.

The idea of just starting to type (or paste) stuff in without regard to structure has an organic appeal that’s missing from very structured approaches to managing information. The structure evolves over time in a wiki, and you don’t have to make any up-front decisions about categorization, etc. And you can actually link to things that don’t even exist yet. I’ve always found the wiki approach well suited to freeform brainstorming and thinking; it’s not the best approach for a set of well-structured records that belong in a database. There is also the whole online collaborative tradition of wikis, and while a personal wiki doesn’t have the collaboration, if you are used to using web-based wikis, having your own probably comes more naturally than if you come from some other background.

Think of presentation or formatted display as a separate step - if you need that, most wiki software lets you get your stuff into a format more conducive for formatting, but daily usage removes all of the extraneous font menus, paragraph alignment dialogs, etc., and lets you focus on quickly working with your information. Wikis aren’t really meant to be word processors. I think the concept is to be fast, simple, and focused on building a small personal web of information rather than adding formatting that is often extraneous. The mechanism for hyperlinking is also very quick and doesn’t interrupt the flow of your typing; other info managers that have hyperlinking usually make you go through some sort of dialog just to add a link.

There are also a lot of benefits to plain text data storage: easy to copy and paste among different applications without losing anything, easy to script and automate using any number of scripting languages, less vulnerable to becoming outdated as technology progresses (I can still open plain text files I have from 1994, but information I had in, say Ascend, is no longer accessible to me). Of course, not all wiki apps use plain text storage, but many of them do.

Of course, it all depends on your needs and usage patterns, but I’ll note that even in programs that have formatting (like Ultra Recall), I hardly ever use bold, italics, etc. - 99% of the time I am just typing what I need to remember or do, etc., and the ability to format doesn’t add anything to that ability. On the flip side, if I’m preparing a document that needs to be well-formatted and read by others, I’ll inevitably end up in a word processor even if a lot of the source text comes from other programs. There are times when a little formatting for personal use is helpful, which is why I won’t try to dissuade Zoot from eventually having RTF, but to me formatting seems like a little tiny bit of gravy and the real meat is the actual text.

The BrainStorm “namesakes” feature actually seems very close to wiki-like links to me, perhaps more so than it seems like “cloning.” The difference is that a whole line has to be a “link,” not just a word or two within a line, but the combination of BrainStorm’s outliner-like features with wiki-like links may be very unique (also consider that even BrainStorm essentially has an edit mode and view mode). I also found Tkoutline at http://tkoutline.sourceforge.net/wiki/ to be an interesting combination of single-pane outliner with the ability to add wiki-style links *between outlines.* Another interesting approach…

Chris