Of all the posts I wrote over the past six months, the second most popular is Why Wiki Sucks – funny, all visits to that post are always from search engine searches for “wiki sucks” or “why wiki sucks.” Seems I’m not alone 
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So, does wiki still suck? Yes, it does for the same reasons outlined earlier. I’m still convinced that the biggest irritant and drawback is the disrespect for the integrity of the written thought. Yes, it’s okay to ask someone to help you improve your style and suggest changes, but it’s not a free-for-all on my paragraphs.
The good part about the wiki is the instant linking – that’s a pretty good concept; though those CamelCased words are awfully ugly and so unnatural. There must be a better way to do that.
The great thing about the wiki concept is plain-text editing. Still think the best reason for wiki popularity is the wow effect one gets when suddenly this plain text magically turns into a nicely formatted page.
Which brings me to one thing that sucks seriously harder than wiki: so-called wysiwyg editors. Word and such. I won’t even mention crap stuff like now-popular web “rich text” editors, like the one I’m forced to use now to type this post on WordPress, or Google Docs. What a tragedy that is. Why do they need “preview” button if it is wysiwyg? Anyone who has ever seen someone spending hours re-wording sentences just to fit above the page break, or endlessly got frustrated over the formatting of the table of contents, or destroyed the layout, color, and font sizes with a copy-and-paste from another document will know what I’m talking about. It’s forcing one to become a layout designer and to type meaningful content all at once. It’s frustrating.
For serious productivity, plain-text is the way to go. Especially in full screen, green text on black – beautiful and productive. I prefer Markdown over wiki markup – it’s really as simple as writing an email.
We’ve now switched all text entry in the new version of ECS to Markdown, and the new user-generated help will use it. It will be an interesting experiment to watch how people react to it, and to the fact they can contribute content to the page either through the web editor or by sending an email. (And yes, we’re protecting the author’s integrity and moderating any changes and contributions).
In either case, today’s wysiwyg editors suck much harder than wiki. If I had to choose, I’d take a wiki over Word on Windows any time.
BTW, the last good Word was Word 5 for DOS.
