Hi Rob!
Thanks for your work of writing these "reflections"! I can only fully acknowledge your statements!
Best regards
Helmut

Rob, thanks for your guest blog post! Congratulations on your 5th anniversary with us!

Thanks for making your review of Wikidot honest — running a project as large as Wikidot is not an easy thing but I believe we do our best to keep Wikidot a stable, reliable and future-proof wiki platform!

Thanks for posting this, Rob. I couldn't agree with you more. The lack of communication has been really bothering me more and more lately. Wikidot needs a kick in the ass and I think you have just done that in a very diplomatic way.

Thanks for taking the time to write this and for everything else you do to keep our slowly dying community alive.

As for my case, i am still starting with wikidot, and i hope that somehow, i will learn a lot from this site and will benefit from the colloquiums here much as you have.
Kudos Wikidot!!!

Great post Rob,

I think the points you make, especially about no WYSIWYG are excellent. I have to use SharePoint at work, and the flaky formatting drives me insane. It is great to be able to type in a particular bit of syntax and get a consistent result.

My 5th anniversary comes up in October. I've been a bit slack at contributing to the community of late, but I'm speaking about wikis at a big conference at the end of May, and I hope I can convince a few people of the benefits of wikis in general and Wikidot in particular.

http://www.mav.asn.au/events/Pages/2013-lg-infrastructure-asset-management-conference-29052013.aspx

Great post, Rob!

I worry that the lack of communication is dampening the growth of the community. I'm guessing 90% of Wikidot's active gurus joined in 2009 or before. Community engagement (such as Pieter provided) to show that the project is under active development and responsive to its users is, I think, essential to attracting super-fans who greatly enhance the experience of using Wikidot (especially if they are active on community.wikidot, answering questions; or building tools and businesses around it).

Personally, I haven't been pushing the platform to its limits and so don't feel much urgency about the wishes on feedback.wikidot, but it would be nice to see a roadmap and hear about new features every once in a while.

Also, kudos to Wikidot for letting Rob post his honest thoughts here.

kudos to Wikidot for letting Rob post his honest thoughts here.

:) I must confess I didn't ask, I just did it.

… to keep our slowly dying community alive.

I am not sure if this really happening… after the creation of important "documentation wikis" ( for my business partners) and some interesting and challenging creating of applikations - like the "Calendar", or my growing "genealogy template" - I have the feeling that we are all "living with wikidot as it is" - and have now reached the point where 95% works well and only some new little wishes are missed which would make our live easier (of course for us important :) ) .

I know the phrase "only some new little wishes" is not the reality now with the big numbers of waiting wishes, but I try to describe my feeling about the quote above.
The new applications built (like Amazones Storage Cloud or Kenneth's Mobile App ) were more the reaction of the changing environment in the world around us.
And my partners are till today a little bit "unwilling" to use our wikidot documentation wikis - but with less technical but more philosophical arguments like: why should I write my knowledge in a "Knowledge Base" only to make me unneccessary in my business dept?"
But that is another story.

I detect now that i started 6 years ago on 1. May… it is a long way together!

Yes I hit this problem as well in my current Intranet/KM/Wiki position and so I spend a lot of time telling people that providing access for staff to knowledge across the company is a good thing for that member of staff as well as for all staff. It can show you are an expert and therefore someone to go to to answer follow-on questions. But keeping it private and "personal" is a very bad situation that helps no-one.

WYSIWYG is a must today - especially if you look at Confluence you can see that it's possible to get it right.

The only reason I have not yet moved away from Wikidot is that all the alternative sites have some other issues.