Wikis and web publishing

Wikis have had a lot of exposure recently in the press and their profile has been growing for a couple of years.

I’m Web Editor for Decode - a creative magazine for Bath & Bristol - and about 18 months ago we decided to move away from our mostly static pretty site to a new dynamic, content driven site. We decided on using a Wiki, believing it to be the tool we needed to showcase the best writing from around the area.

Eighteen months on and most of the contributors to the website hate it - they hate the way it’s really fiddly to get the formatting they want and more importantly how hard it is to add picture and well make the site look pretty.

Adding content to a Wiki is really straight forward - anyone can do it and that is half the problem. The style guide we use is routinely ignored. Everybody seems to have an idea about the best colours to use to highlight text. In fact it looks a bit of a mess. Adding pictures is so tough that even I find it hard - so consequently the site is so heavy on the text that things can look a bit flat.

So to the solution - well there are two strands to this. Firstly we need a new tool, a web publishing tool not a social software tool, something suited to the job, not something that is ‘cool’. Mambo seems to be the main candidate at the moment, but we are also looking at Drupal.

Secondly and most importantly a change of outlook - publishing on a website is different to publishing on a Wiki. It’s more formal for one, your name is attached to the post. Prioritising of content is down to the editor rather than it being a bit of a free-for-all. Processes are applied by the software not by editorial guidelines. This I guess will make the website more like the magazine and less like the collection of ’stuff’ it is now.

The new site is still really only at the planning stage and the changes we need to make should be addressed now rather than waiting for the website launch. Getting buy-in at an early stage will mean less of shock to the contributors and readers alike when it is launched.