Filed under: metrics
The O’Reilly Network’s Scott Hacker wrote a piece on
wiki support yesterday, Where’s the Movable Type of the Wiki World?,
published with some eloquent commentary by visitors at the end.
Hacker suggests the Wiki world needs its own elegant, soup-to-nuts
wikiproject, comparing the chaos of wiki communities and documentation
to that of the blogging world pre-Movable Type. He shopped around
for a wiki to use for an educational project (which was itself inspired
by WikiPedia, retro camel caps and all), and finally settled on
MediaWiki. Unfortunately, its “scattered and obtuse”
documentation, “stupidly difficult” customizations, and lack of
compact, neatly packaged documentation for end-users, left him
cold.
U.Penn student Swarat Chaudhury, writing for India’s venerable
paper The
Statesman, is a bit more optimistic:
(http://www.wiktionary. org), a collaborative multilingual dictionary
with pronunciations, etymology and quotations. The grand ambition of
these projects is nothing short of letting the demos beat the experts
at their own game… Personally, I still rely on the OED most of the
time, but I also look forward to a day when Wiktionary beats it hands
down.“
Despite flaws, users hope for dominance of Wiktionary, Mediawiki …