Wikis
Wikis are a great tool for knowledge management, great for quickly documenting insights you've gained and ideas of interest. It's like your own hyperlinked encyclopedia which you can add to, or whatever. Wikipedia was probably the wiki that captured the attention of most people and whilst not perfect it's great to see this vast body of humanity's knowledge growing.
My journey with wikis started with Wikipedia followed by a side trip to blogging. Blogging is a less structured form of knowledge management, a hyperlinked online journal in essence. Whilst looking for a convenient way to store recipes I came across TiddlyWiki.
TiddlyWiki is not your typical client/server wiki, everything is stored in a html file that incorporates JavaScript. That means its all run on the client and you only have one file to worry about which has its ups and downs. Version control is rather rudimentary but you can always chuck that single file into a version control repository. TiddlyWiki also has an easily accessible blogging function, so you get your structure and your informality.
Not entirely happy with TiddlyWiki's feature set I eventually found out about the MoinMoin Wiki engine. This is a traditional client/server wiki architecture although there is a stand-alone distribution. The stand-alone distribution is a bit messier to work with than TiddlyWiki, what with having to start services and all. However it is one of the few client/server wikis that can run as a stand-alone and should be a lot easier to move the a server.
MoinMoin is used by quite a few of hosts of open source projects such as Apache and Ubuntu. Whilst I haven't had a chance to use it properly it has all the features that you've come to expect from most other wikis like JSPWiki. Unlike a lot of other wiki engines MoinMoin does not use a relation database, instead data is stored in a flat structure of files.
At the end of one project I used TiddlyWiki to capture my knowledge of that project. Whilst hastily written it was quite effective in letting me capture ideas as soon as they came to my head and letting me quickly group and link articles together. In a later project I have used JSPWiki right from the start. That too has been great in knowledge management and saving us time in recalling insights which disappear as quickly as they were gained. The time spent updating wikis and administering them is more than gained in ensuring knowledge does not slip away and the speed of recall.
My journey with wikis started with Wikipedia followed by a side trip to blogging. Blogging is a less structured form of knowledge management, a hyperlinked online journal in essence. Whilst looking for a convenient way to store recipes I came across TiddlyWiki.
TiddlyWiki is not your typical client/server wiki, everything is stored in a html file that incorporates JavaScript. That means its all run on the client and you only have one file to worry about which has its ups and downs. Version control is rather rudimentary but you can always chuck that single file into a version control repository. TiddlyWiki also has an easily accessible blogging function, so you get your structure and your informality.
Not entirely happy with TiddlyWiki's feature set I eventually found out about the MoinMoin Wiki engine. This is a traditional client/server wiki architecture although there is a stand-alone distribution. The stand-alone distribution is a bit messier to work with than TiddlyWiki, what with having to start services and all. However it is one of the few client/server wikis that can run as a stand-alone and should be a lot easier to move the a server.
MoinMoin is used by quite a few of hosts of open source projects such as Apache and Ubuntu. Whilst I haven't had a chance to use it properly it has all the features that you've come to expect from most other wikis like JSPWiki. Unlike a lot of other wiki engines MoinMoin does not use a relation database, instead data is stored in a flat structure of files.
At the end of one project I used TiddlyWiki to capture my knowledge of that project. Whilst hastily written it was quite effective in letting me capture ideas as soon as they came to my head and letting me quickly group and link articles together. In a later project I have used JSPWiki right from the start. That too has been great in knowledge management and saving us time in recalling insights which disappear as quickly as they were gained. The time spent updating wikis and administering them is more than gained in ensuring knowledge does not slip away and the speed of recall.
Labels: applications, computers, wiki
posted by Forrest Rivers at 20:51
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