A while back, Weiqi posted about Eric Burke‘s comments about Wikis; one point being that “WikiWordLooksStupidAndAreNotNormal”. I mostly agree with that, and the Wiki tool we’ve been using recently, MediaWiki, supports non-WikiWords trivially. Eric is working on new Wiki software that sounds quite compelling.
The notion of needing some new software with which to set up a Wiki-repository for misc. project-related information seems a little behind the times. I set such a thing seven years ago, in 1999 – and it was old news then.
I have a personal aversion to re-solving such a well solved problem; it feels like duplication, which I have deep aversion to in code, to the extent I’ve held on to this snippet from a post by Ryan King on the TDD mailing list in 2002:
“So, duplication sucks. The more rabidly a person hates duplication, the more I trust their opinions on managing information. A programmer, upon noticing some redundancy, should be thrown into a panic, begin hyperventilating, and stammer something about “¡El diablo! !El diablo está en mi software!”.”
And yet… I have done such things myself many times – for a while in my early days of programming, I implemented a text editor a couple of times each year. There’s something deeply valuable in the experience of building something yourself, I think it is a mistake to dismiss such efforts as “Not Invented Here”.