Wikis

Trevor clued me in to using a wiki for managing things like specifications at work. That's the collaborative software behind sites like Wikipedia. His team at work uses one (and it he talks about it a bit on his blog.) I'd pushed for one for specifications on my team at Microsoft and met with enormous resistance. We'd been using FlexWiki, a system built on ASP.NET by some Microsoft people, but open source. It was amazing to me that my team at Microsoft, intent on designing a website designed for community building, was resistant to a wiki and preferred Word documents posted on a SharePoint server.

I've been toying with the idea of taking my miniature wargaming system (The WarEngine) and putting it into an open source environment via a wiki. I'd tried starting on that using FlexWiki, but wasn't really all that satisfied with the experience. The reason for doing this is that there are fans of the system still actively playing it some five to six years after I'd left the business who want a new edition, but I've finally confessed to myself that it's unlikely I'll ever do it. This would put it in their hands. If I host it and include some advertising, perhaps I can even generate a little revenue while still doing right by the fans.

In a kind of trial of this concept, I've set up a wiki site (that I will leave undisclosed for the moment, since I want to get the very basics fleshed out before I make it too public) using MediaWiki, which is the same software behind Wikipedia. It's probably total overkill for the WarEngine and I do feel a little weird using software based on PHP and MySQL, but then it seems like the best tool for the job, and after all, I still use a Palm-based Treo rather than a Smartphone.

The site for it is coming together really nicely and I'm finding the experience of contributing to the wiki rather compelling in and of itself. I'm looking forward to sharing the site with the fans within a week or so. And in the meantime, I've contributed my first edits to Wikipedia, too.