Wikis and the evolution and development of ideas

As I write, I realise the writing tool I am using is not what I should be writing in.

Most documents I write start with a Sticky and quickly migrate to BBEdit, which keeps up with the speed I sometimes type at. Often I use Mail, because I happen to be there which has an “as you go” spell-checker. I bought TextMate but it still seems a bit goofy somehow.

As a document gets longer and more complex I then have to switch to Word because it has Styles, although I can never quite control them properly, but mainly because it has a “Document Map”. If you’ve never tried using the Document Map and work on long documents with nested headers in, you should give it a try, it means you can jump between sections and is an invaluable feature to me.

Often, once Word’s formatting has driven me insane, I import the file into Apple’s Pages which has a much simpler interface but no Document Map. Pages can handle lots of images though whereas Word stumbles as soon as a few screenshots get added.

Many times, before I jump from text editing (with BBEdit or Mail) into DTP (with Word or Pages) I consider using a Wiki in some form. The reason for doing this is that my words and ideas don’t need formatting with fonts and sizes, they need organising. At this point the flow and structure of the document are still up for grabs and ideally I’d like to be able to write… quickly… and link relevant resources and then re-order certain chunks. Copying and Pasting in Word is not reorganising, it’s hacking the text.

At times, when in the WikiWhirl, I have tried PHPWiki and WikkaWiki and the MacOS X Desktop version of MoinMoin called MoinX. These are all OK and standard Wiki tools but at this stage of the game, I don’t want a browser based Wiki because they are too cumbersome, I need a desktop GUI-based Wiki, with spell-checking and the ability to keep up with the speed of thought.

On the desktop side of things I have tried, PersonalWiki. PersonalWiki was great except for a few bugs that lose the formatting (ouch!). The real promise of it was that can export to HTML. Although it says I can use my own templates it doesn’t tell me how. PersonalWiki was a great project that ran out of steam/money/time. Tantalisingly it also looked like it may be able to import/export from standard online wiki tools (such as MoinMoin) but the lack of documentation (and the difficulty installing MoinMoin on MacOS X) meant that I never got that “killer” feature running.

WikiNotes looks very promising, but exports very ugly old HTML. It would be better if it exported ugly old HTML but used DIV tags for a header, content, footer etc and left me to edit a CSS file to make it a little less ugly.

Yesterday I trially a number of PHP and python based wiki tools, desperate for one that would sing for me. None did. Java-based SnipSnap and Confluence look worth a look but they are either TomCat dependant (so won’t run on my host) or very expensive.

The best wikis I have seen so far are commercial services or privately owned, like SWIK, Peanut Butter, StikiPad and OpenText. From a usability and syntax point of view, there are no good open source wikis. Of course, if the content in an open source gets compelling enough then the quality of the tool becomes less important, people will struggle with form-based editing and geeky syntax because, well, it’s just the way it is.

All of this leads to a point of complete disbelief really. I can’t believe that I’m the only person who would kill for a GUI wiki tool that had an exit-route towards online tools. I can’t believe how there are no tools that support the creation of networks of information (hypertexts if you will). The tools of today still are biased towards editing text, not relating text. We are still in the dark ages. The web is all about networks, connections, clouds and clusters of information and yet we author using notepad, poor CMSs and document editors. It’s not about the document, it’s about the nodes IN the document, it’s about the connections between the nodes in the document. It’s a wiki.

As I write this I wonder if I have a disability that goes, whenever I do anything, I wonder if I could do it better or quicker or with more elegance so that I never actually finish what I started out to acheive. Right now, I should be writing, but I’m writing about the way I was writing and wondering if I could write better if I took a few days off to build a tool that helped me write the way I want to, one that started in text, added structure (but not formatting) and then allowed multimedia and layout, and finally was in a format that allowed online access, comments and collaboration.

Documents (or ideas) are not static things, not document types… their format should evolve over time as they get improved and shaped. They may start as quick notes and end as richly linked and organised tomes but the way in which you work with them should be appropriate to their needs, not the application or tool you are working with.