Thoughts on wikis

Over the last few years I have, like everyone else, put more and more information into wikis.

I've used three main platforms: MediaWiki (Choral Public Domain Library, http://www.cpdl.org/), PBwiki (e.g. http://iseries.pbwiki.com/) and TracWiki.

Those who have known me for a while will be aware of my tendency to bang on about information as an organisational asset, how difficult it is to get people to share information at all, and the consequent need to provide information repositories with capture mechanisms that involve minimal time and effort to use.

Information is more or less useless if it's inaccurate, if it's unclear, if you don't belong to the audience for which it was written, or if you can't retrieve it in an effective and timely manner.

So I was, and remain, delighted with the concept of a wiki, which allows easy capture, sharing, review and correction of information, which can give it a structure that permits effective retrieval and avoids duplication, and which encourages accuracy and clarity.

However, the devil has turned out to be in the detail.

When people put information into written form, it may be well structured, or it may be a brain dump. In my experience, any structure comes from the author's head and is internal to the document under preparation, unless the individual's day-to-day work specifically involves structured documentation. Therefore, in my view, if we are to get information out of people's heads and readily usable by others, we have to start with the content, and accept that structure may need to be added later.

If you ask someone to document something for you, they will typically create a Word document. It may have diagrams and complex tables. There may be careful formatting aimed at making the information easier to understand.

All wiki platforms I have used appear to make the following assumptions:
1) Formatting, beyond a very basic level, doesn't matter
2) People are prepared to put time and effort into learning and using the platform and/or its WYSIWYG editor
3) All content fits cleanly into a predefined structure
4) Once the information is in the wiki, people don't need to get it out again
5) Users are IT literate and have a conceptual interest in the wiki as a platform

The first alarm bells started to ring for me when I realised that not all wiki platforms used the same markup language - surely, if anything needed an open standard, this does.

I then started to wonder (and I still do) why wiki markup languages existed at all except as a structure-imposing superset of normal HTML. Do all wiki developers really want to waste their time writing the world's umpteenth not-very-good WYSIWYG editor?

I tried and failed to rename wiki pages (come on, chaps, even the most basic HTML editing tools let you change page names and automatically update all the relevant internal links for you). Structure is surely not a once-and-for-all thing.

I searched in vain for ways of adding links that did not involve two browser windows plus cut and paste (the honourable exception is PBwiki).

I pasted Word information into wiki WYSIWYG editors, even Word information that had been saved as filtered HTML and then put on the clipboard from IE, and most of the formatting disappeared (except, again, on PBwiki).

I attempted to export a set of wiki pages from one wiki and put them into another, or even to generate a PDF with all the linked information in it ... Surely I'm not the only one who wants to use the wiki for capture, maintenance, and day-to-day information retrieval, but still to have the option of publishing the results in final form? And surely I'm not the only one who gets fed up with one wiki platform and decides to try another?

To sum up, to say that I am disappointed with what has happened to a fantastically simple and brilliant idea would be a major understatement.

Saturday 28 November: Chandos Singers concert in Bath: Mendelssohn, Haydn, Berlioz and Kokkonen

The Chandos Singers
Supporting the Friends of the Royal United Hospital
Conductor: Malcolm Hill

Te Deum Laudamus
Mendelssohn Te Deum for Two Choirs and a Piano
Haydn Te Deum for the Empress Marie Therese
with works by Berlioz and Kokkonen

Saturday 28th November, 7.30, St. Bartholomew’s Church, Oldfield Park, Bath

Tickets £10, Students £5 available from 01225 824046 or 01225 463362
Full Details from http://www.chandos-singers.co.uk/

Sunday 22 November, 7.30pm: Ashton Singers concert in Winchester College Chapel

Paul Wright organ
Julian Macey conductor

Concert in the beautiful late 14th century setting of Winchester College Chapel, in aid of Winchester Churches Nightshelter.

Britten Rejoice in the Lamb
Harvey I love the Lord
Mahler Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen
Mendelssohn Sechs Sprüche zum Kirchenjahr
Pärt The Beatitudes

For more information, visit www.ashtonsingers.hampshire.org.uk.

Tagul, or a tag cloud like a clickable Wordle

In effect, a clickable Wordle which acts as a tag cloud, and dead easy to create and embed. I'm still working on this one (the tags are an automatic extract from my website home page, which clearly doesn't mention the iSeries enough). I think that even the smallest words in the tag cloud need to be legible! More information at tagul.com. Free of charge at the moment, though it may not always be so if used commercially. Good stuff.

If you are using an RSS reader and can't see the tag cloud, you need to open this item rather than just preview it.

IT Forum Christmas Meeting 2009, Cliveden, Maidenhead : Encryption and i/OS Security

This year's IT Forum Christmas meeting at Cliveden, near Maidenhead, Berkshire, will be on the topic of Encryption and i/OS Security.

I'm delighted to say that our main speaker will be Thomas Barlen, Consulting IT Specialist, System i Security, IBM Europe.

The agenda is likely to cover:
. V6R1 i/OS BRMS based encryption with Opt 44
. V6R1 ASP Encryption of i/OS database
. Tape Encryption with IBM Tape Libraries (LTO and TS11x0)
. Encryption Key Management with EKM and TKLM
. External DS Disk Subsystem Based Encryption (Joe Mellor, IBM UK)
. i/OS Security and IBM Secure Perspective

The meeting will be on Wednesday 9 December.

If you are interested in attending, please let me know:
01225 436302
mandy.shaw@iperimeter.co.uk

Possibly the greatest spam item ever

'We Apologize for the delay of your payment and all the Inconveniences and hiccups that we might have caused you. However, we were having some minor problems with our payment system, which is Inexplicable, and have held us stranded and Indolent, not having the Prerequisite to devote our 100% endowment in accrediting foreign payments.'

'stranded and Indolent' sounds like something out of Tristram Shandy.

What's so terrible about charging for content?

There's again been a lot of discussion in the media recently about charging for digital content.

Many otherwise law-abiding people clearly think it's perfectly acceptable to obtain a free copy of chargeable content.

The issue gets mixed up with perennial (and often justified) moans about the ridiculous prices charged by the recording industry for CDs.

But it seems pretty simple to me. A.com publishes some content. B wants to access it. A.com is entitled to charge whatever it likes. If B doesn't like the charge, tough, they don't get to access the content. If A.com overcharges, its revenues will be affected. If A.com charges a reasonable amount for a good product, its bank manager is happy, and so is B.

I am, admittedly, rather biased. I work in the software industry. I come from a family of publishers and am married to a sheet music publisher. I spent many years acting as librarian for a choir, and being aware that if we were caught photocopying music it would be the librarian who got the rap.

When people purchase choral music as downloads from my husband's website, they almost invariably buy only one copy - the exceptions shine out. So are these purchasers of single copies sharing a single score? I think not. For some reason they think printing multiple copies acceptable, despite the clear indication on the website that one purchase equals one print. If they bought a printed copy of a score from Barenreiter or Oxford, would they think it acceptable to photocopy it for 30 choir members? Almost certainly not.

I don't want to sound holier than thou. In my early youth I did copy LPs to tape, because I couldn't afford to buy them, and I did photocopy music, for the same reason. But now, if I want to listen to a CD but I don't want to buy it, I can look it up on Spotify and listen legally and free of charge; I just have to put up with extraordinarily banal advertisements. If I want to listen to something right away and it's not on Spotify, I do have to pay, but I can download it on demand - I don't have to wait for the record shop to open. If I want a piece of choral sheet music but I don't want to buy it, I try the Choral Public Domain Library; I may not get such a good edition; tough.

Publishers are not, generally, in the business of diddling people. They are in the business of preparing content that people want, presenting it in a high quality way, and expecting a reasonable return. What justification can people possibly have for bypassing this? No more than they would have for walking into Waitrose and stealing a banana.