Issues in Designing Using Wiki

Wiki pages like these constitute a work in progress. Although it is relatively easy to enter text and create links in a wiki, the first barrier in using one for a large project is determining how to structure the wiki pages to hold the work, i.e., breaking the on-going work into screen size chunks. In the initial research phase, it would be nice to include references where one could click on them to go to the associated pdf, but there are problems. One is that there is no wiki equivalent of BibTeX or Endnote. Using BibTeX and converting the .bbl file to wiki references may be done with a Perl program bbl2wiki.pl.

Because this work is on an internal wiki page, the numerous PDF files accumulated while researching RBAC might be placed on an internal server to make it easier to click through to access each one without the intervening "HTML preview not available" page when linking to attachments. Also, lots of attachments clutter the page.

It seems that only the Trac administrator can remove a Trac attachment. This raises the cost of playing around with where to put such attachments for references.

Besides learning a new way to document ones work, there are other issues. Andrew Lincoln Burrow [Bur04] states "The open and collective authorship of hypertext is the basis of wiki. It was pioneered by Ward Cunningham in the Portland Pattern Repository as a means to discuss software engineering strategies. In essence, wiki provides a model for collaboration, because it removes many impediments to shared authorship. However, it does not represent and restrict access to a document, and is thus not in a position to model the movement of a document from a narrower to a wider audience. Where creative ideas are at stake, this is often a barrier to the use of wiki."

"We observe two causes for wariness toward early disclosure. The first is the need to incubate ideas: premature comparison or criticism endangers the development of an idea, because every new idea requires a certain suspension of disbelief. The second is a conundrum of collaboration: we must share ideas to realize their value, but in doing so we diminish our own control. For these reasons, certain valuable types of collaboration require flexibility in determining access rules."