I’ve been on WetPaint today and the paint is barely dry on my posts. Still it just brought home to me again how much I generally dislike wiki editors. While WetPaint is pretty cool and easy to use I still had the usual crash.. when I went to save the page for the first time. It wouldn’t save. Good job I’d saved the page in a blog editor…. otherwise the work may have easily been gone.
This set me off looking for a Wiki Editor. I really found nothing on the net that was working or complete. So I Tweeted it. I got an answer back from Ross Mayfield in seconds (bet he has “track” wiki on!) and another from Luis Suarez moments later. That’s one of the cool things about using Twitter. I learned that SocialText understands part of the problem (working unplugged or offline) although doesn’t appear to have what I am looking for. BTW..In the past I have updated Socialtext wikis via by email, so it does actually integrate with a solution that many of us use. I can also do my blog that way. Still this lacks the power of editors I’m used to and I feel it would be taking me backwards.
@stuart click on the unplug icon at the bottom of this page http://www.socialtext.net/e… about 4 hours ago Twitter / Ross : @stuart click on the unplug…
@stuarthensall RE: wiki editor with xmlrpc, did you actually check out http://wikimatrix.org You may find the right option through it about 4 hours ago Twitter / Luis Suarez: @stuarthensall RE: wiki
Is it long past time for the wikiworld to get their act together. As the world becomes wikified we will work across more and more fragmented wiki platforms. Company A will not use Company B’s wiki etc. Yet the same employee may participate in both or more. Can’t we get one editor that updates major wikis like mediawiki or twikiwiki?
Why do I want this solution? Here’s the problem and potential solution.
- I want to create a new page on a wiki.
- I want to use a standard text editor like Scribefire, Flock, Qumana etc. Just like I use on my blog.
- I want to be able to use the same editor across multiple wiki’s for I participate in more than one.
- I want to use it offline.
- I want to be a able to open a wiki page just like I open a post and edit it on my blog.
- I want it to recognize if any changes were made to the wiki as part of publishing my changes.
- I want the wiki to know that I have a page checked out and when it was last known as active.
Now I know many will say… why create it offline? Why do you need an editor etc. I have two key reasons.
- New Wiki’s pages are simply blank sheets and many are uncomfortable saving something n times before it is done and notifying the world during the process. Outside of an editor everything is a workaround. An editor enables us to work on things and “post” when we are ready. I know some wikis have the option of not publishing all changes you have made.
- I simply hate losing work. Wouldn’t it be easier if I could save it or work on it in an offline mode and then update / upload later?
Providing me with an editor that goes across blogs and wikis reduces the number of tools that I have to learn. And often, wiki syntax isn’t that easy for a newbie. It makes it easier to direct my efforts and create and remember new accounts. It also enables the opportunity to update more than one record at a time or to keep a record of my “posts” or recent changes to various wikis as part of my lifestream.
Frankly it’s about time the WikiWorld had the equivalent of XMLRPC. If it does I’m blind for I’ve never seen it.
What else does it need. This Wiki Editor should have the capability to act a little like del.icio.us. It should identify pages that I may want to link to or should link to (little like Jiglu), it should concurrently provide tags that may also be relevant. In other words, make my integration easier. Help me pick up on related pages etc.
The question is when can I have it?
Technorati Tags: luis suarez, ross mayfield, socialmedia, socialtext, wetpaint, Wikis, xmprpc
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Stuart! Long time no interact.
So much to respond to in your post. Yes, I agree, wiki world needs to catch up and get with a better editing program.
Long ago when I was still working on PurpleWiki Eugene and I hooked up some XML-RPC editing. It was pretty slick, but in the PurpleWiki context proved not all that useful: PurpleWiki is a very linking oriented rather than content generation oriented wiki. Being outside the context of the other pages was not particularly exciting.
Other wiki, like say Socialtext, are a bit more content oriented and various editing systems would be cool. Ross already pointed out Socialtext Unplugged: the offline editor for Socialtext. It is based on new functionality in TiddlyWiki which makes it possible to do offline editing for lots of different types of wikis. You can have content from various places all at once in the same HTML file on your own storage.
You can’t, however, edit the content in other tools, such as whatever your favorite editor may be. Lately I’ve not found this to much of a limitation. In the morning I gather up whatever content I care about into an unplugged artifact, get on my bike and go wherever, do some editing in a simple text area (with spell checking) and head out. There are extensions to Firefox that will allow a textarea to open in whatever editor you want to use, which is cool.
Unplugged takes advantage of Socialtext’s REST API to move content back and forth. It’s written in such a way that it is very simple to make adapters for a bunch of editors. One hack we did was to connect TextMate to a wiki via Ruby using the REST API.
Luke Closs created an awesome geeky tool called wikrad which is a terminal based wiki browser and editor. If you are a vim or emacs user it is awesome.
At the moment all these things just work for Socialtext, but we’ve had such a good time with the REST API that we are convinced it would make a good interface for most wikis. We hope to start a project called Amo to get some traction with that. If it did, then tools that use Amo would work with all that wikis that support it.
Another path is using Atom. There are a growing number of Atom editors and various wikis are experimenting with support for the Atom Publishing Protocol. I’ve done some work in the Socialtext code for such things. I have it basically working, all I really need is some time. Atom is far better than XML-RPC for this sort of thing.
Hi Chris,
Great to see you back here! I had no idea you were at Socialtext. Thanks for the detailed answer and the links to check out. The atom editor sound promising.
I’m wanting something to make my life easy going between different wiki’s. I’m wanting that editor to link me with other users on each wiki. I’m also wanting it to keep track of my updates. Diigo integration may work. So I need an RSS output of my updates. Eg link to page when I was last there / changes / in a different color etc.
I’ll certainly commend efforts to make this happen. If not if it works for Wikipedia / MediaWiki then maybe it’s enough to go everywhere. It’s not always the best tool that wins; it is the default everyone can use.
I think we keep hoping that wikis will get easier. I think this is a mistake. What we have seen is walled gardens built with better and better editors. That’s faulty. When wiki is everywhere they will not all be the same. The barrier to participation must be lowered.
Once upon a time (circa 2002), I spec’d out a rough XML-RPC API for wiki:
http://decafbad.com/twiki/bin/view/Main/XmlRpcToWiki
I’d say wikis have gotten richer since then, and we have different ways to build APIs and provide data. That’s good, though it means I don’t think we’ll ever have a single API or editor that covers all or even most wikis - other than the browser, of course.
The SocialText stuff looks might keen, though.
I’m still concerned that we are looking at how we work with a wiki rather than how we work with wikis and more importantly, how we work! I think the future of collaborative work is in wikis and blogs.
I Also am feeling that the more I work on different wikis the more I want to keep track of what I did and updated. For it was my perspective at that point in time. I saw a little of this in the WikiDashboard program shared at KMWorld, however, how do I bring my contributions back to my lifestream? If I don’t have a wiki participation program… little like delicious how do I keep track? Author updates / RSS, all popular wikis?
Here’s an example. You are in company x. They have a wiki and use WikiDashboard. All your work is on customers sites; so you have no presence on your company’s site. How do you share your work.. how does the company see your contributions? How do you aggregate it in with what you are doing?
FWIW XWiki has a very nice XMLRPC editor called XEclipse:
http://www.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Code/XEclipseExtension
It works for both XWiki and Confluence.
-Vincent
XWiki Developer