Day: November 20, 2006

Just as I was finishing the last sentence of the previous post, my computer shut down. There was no warning, no time to process that it was happening, it just… went off.

I was already mentally composing the short I had written up a cure for cancer but my stupid computer ate it and now I can’t remember it note—because naturally I hadn’t saved an intermediate copy, despite being a geek who knows full well that this sort of thing happens all the time at the worst possible moment—but I remembered that Firefox 2.0 saves the last browser session in case of crashes. Hoping that didn’t just mean opens the last bunch of tabs, I started it up… and, as you can tell from this post’s title, it was all there. Every last character. Huzzah!

Now if I could just figure out why the SATA drive I installed a few months ago has been causing this to happen at least once a week….

One of the most common complaints I hear at work these days is that it’s too hard to find information, particularly on our relatively new wiki. I see this as a combination of several issues:

• We treat the wiki as a bunch of individual, unrelated documents instead of a web of complementary information. A coworker recently set out to map the structure of our wiki; I haven’t heard back, but I’m fairly certain his graph will look more like a bicycle wheel than a spiderweb.
• We don’t use the wiki as a wiki. The idea of a WikiWord seems foreign; many people actively override the automatic linking given to CamelCased words because they don’t like to see little question marks on pages that haven’t been created. And I can’t count the number of times I’ve gone to a page and found nothing but a bunch of attached Word documents; worse, they’re often just multiple revisions of the same file; worse still, the documents are invariably nothing more than a paragraph or two of text, which could have been put directly into the wiki in the first place! (This happens with email too, and manifests itself in our source control system.)
• We use the wiki as a dumping ground, and try to force it to do things it was never designed to do. Got a status report that’s a snapshot of a webpage? Cut-and-paste it onto the wiki, preferably on a new page so it’ll be impossible to link to the newest version. Need to parse an XML file, look up some values in a database and make the results into a PNG file? Write it as a wiki page!
• We don’t have the WikiNature. If WikiNature is typing in a bunch of book titles, coming back a day later, and finding them turned into birds in the Amazon, WorkNature so far is typing in a bunch of book titles, coming back a day later, finding the same book titles, then never coming back. I’ve tried to create some artificial “hub” pages, and to add context where I think it’s useful or relevant, but it seems to be a losing battle.

I’m sure Matt is reading this and chuckling to himself (or tearing out his hair) thinking about how this sounds like our early experiences with adopting agile development practices, and I don’t deny seeing certain parallels myself. (Some of those are in my reaction to how I see things being done versus how I think they should be; I think it was Mike L. at work who coined the term irrational idealist, and that certainly fits the bill.) Several solutions have been proposed, including adding a search engine (marginally successful due to the lack of interconnectedness noted above), hiring a librarian (perceived as a waste of resources), and—my favourite—education (scuttled due to lack of interest in mundane topics). In the end, it’s going to be up to the company’s employees—my coworkers—to work together as a team to start making the wiki work for us.

I just hope that happens sooner than later, before our several thousand pages become several hundred thousand.