2013/7/31 Vincent Massol <[email protected]>
BTW from a marketing POV it's better to say that "XWiki is a wiki farm solution" than "XWiki is a wiki" since it differentiates us from other solutions such as Confluence, TWiki, Mediawiki, etc.
If you say that with XWiki you can create work spaces, then so does confluence. You can create as many spaces as you wish with Confluence. But Confluence doesn't support multi tenancy.
It's probably the only real differentiator of XWiki vs other wikis. You're trying to make this difference disappear while I'm trying to make it surface. That's probably one of the reasons of non-agreement.
Is it really ? What drew me into XWiki at (almost) the very beginning, was that killer-feature of exposing an XClass model right into wiki pages, and ability to create applications through scripting and structured data without any server-side coding or custom database schema creation ... To me it's still the core originality of XWiki compared to others, and that's the 'X'. I don't think any other wiki does that, but many of them propose various solutions to organize content, whatever the name. Components are nice (to build additional/structured/stable/maintanable/documented APIs) but it's not original at all, as Extensions (sometimes called "plugin" elsewhere, as in old xwiki system). Multi-tenancy is also a killer feature in its kind, but I'm not sure it's very exposed (so, here, going in the same direction as you, naming these "wiki" or better "sub-wiki" versus "workspace" may be a way to promote this, but "workgroup" does not add any information more than "workspace" when it comes to multi-tenancy), nor does it interest the same category of people. "workgroup" or "group" makes me think about a team and its members, but not at a subwiki at all. Typically, the sentence may be "A workgroup uses a dedicated [workspace|wiki|sub-wiki] [to work collaboratively|to share] on a specific subject". I think the term "(work)group" is even more generic (and less meaningful) than workspace can be ... The confusion between "space" and "workspace" may even be a good thing, as even you consider both can fulfill almost same needs when nested spaces will be implemented (by the way, why having 2 different ways to do almost exactly the same thing, and how could this make xwiki easier for end users, while their main issue to add content to a wiki is that they are lost understanding what is correct location to put the information ...). Anyway I think "sub-wiki" is far better and clearer than "wiki" even if longer.
Thanks -Vincent
On Jul 31, 2013, at 10:57 AM, Silvia Rusu <[email protected]> wrote:
Hi,
Without wanting to add more fire to the debate I'd like to make a few comments regarding the naming issue. Edi said above "For me, the "wiki" is the entire environment (main wiki + all its subwikis), as a whole, by definition." I was remembered of an old thread I read while googling "XWiki Workspaces" where a potential TWiki user was comparing options and he only used the term wiki in its singular form ( http://twiki.org/cgi-bin/view/Support/SID-00140 ). I agree that users tend to think of the whole environment as "the wiki". If I wasn't part of the XWiki community I'd probably be sharing their opinion :)
I think the naming depends a lot on the message we are trying to transmit. Do we want the emphasis to be on the content, or are we looking to underline the collaboration aspect more? If we are trying to say XWiki should be used for: * Knowledge building > the term "wiki" is appropriate * Collaboration > "workspaces" sounds better IMO
An argument in favor of workspaces would be avoiding the intimidation & fear factor: most users associate wikis with Wikipedia. Let's say I'm an HR manager and I need a place where I can store CVs, employee information and where I can discuss things with the HR team. Do I need Wikipedia to achieve this? Sounds a bit too much. Also I thought I already was on a wiki. Should I create a wiki in a wiki? Does that exist ("inception")? This sounds terribly complicated. What if I mess up the wiki?! Maybe I'll get a sys admin to help. Or maybe I'll just create a space somewhere since I don't want to mess up the wiki. Email and Excel I guess are not that bad in the end either.
In conclusion I understand the arguments of both parties which makes it very hard to choose one of the names. In the end if I have to choose I prefer the notion of workspace, since to me this suggests a tool that's easy to use, that helps one get organized, but most of all collaborate more efficiently. I'm not -1 for wiki, I just like the workspace name better.
Silvia
On Wed, Jul 31, 2013 at 11:46 AM, Jeremie BOUSQUET <[email protected]> wrote:
Hello all,
2013/7/31 Sergiu Dumitriu <[email protected]>
On 07/30/2013 05:32 PM, Vincent Massol wrote:
Hi Sergiu,
On Jul 30, 2013, at 6:47 PM, Sergiu Dumitriu <[email protected]> wrote:
Vincent, stop thinking so technical! You're describing the technical implementation of the current "workspace" feature, not the user friendly name that users can understand.
<joking> ok let's stop the xwiki project then! Because it contains the word "wiki" which our users don't understand…. I don't even understand how we get users since obviously they can't understand what xwiki is about… ;) Let's call it "stuff" which is a word that everyone understands surely… </joking>
Are you sure you want to go this way?
http://www.google.com/trends/explore?q=xwiki%2C+mediawiki%2C+confluence
XWiki is almost unknown. XWiki doesn't get the volume of users that a mature and popular project usually gets. We've been struggling to
market
it as an application wiki, yet few users use it that way. How many high quality third party applications do we have in our repository?
I've seen more questions about migrating from Mediawiki than from Confluence, which is our direct competitor. And Confluence is only getting more popular.
The peak of Mediawiki popularity was also the peak of interest in plaintext wikis (Gartner's peak of inflated expectations). And unfortunately the decrease in popularity in Mediawiki is also reflected in the decrease in popularity in XWiki: http://www.google.com/trends/explore?q=xwiki (and twiki, dokuwiki, moinmoin, pmwiki, jspwiki).
Confluence seems to be the winner on the Gartner Hype Cycle.
We haven't even been able to overcome our precursor, TWiki, and I've considered TWiki almost dead for several years: http://www.google.com/trends/explore?q=xwiki%2C+twiki
So don't wonder how we even get users, because we almost don't.
And I didn't say that users don't understand what "wiki" means, just that they misunderstand what XWiki is and what a wiki is in XWiki, because they already know what a wiki is in the traditional way. It's like calling a teleportation device a TCar because it gets you from one place to another, just like a car, but then users will expect all the things they have in a car. There's a reason why different products get different names, instead of just extending the base name: reusing the old name with a prefix causes confusion.
So +1 for choosing something better than "XWiki" as the name of the product, this one hasn't been lucky so far.
No matter how much more accurate the term "wiki" is to what's happening inside, it means less than nothing to our target users. Less, because it's misleading instead of helpful.
So yes, on the inside we have __entities__ named documents, spaces and wikis, and this isn't about changing those. It's about adding names that end users can understand to the __concepts__ that those entities represent.
<joking> Yeah, let's rename "document" by "book page", "space" by "book" and "wiki" by "shelf". I"m sure users will understand better! </joking>
Did I even mention "renaming"? I explicitly said that this isn't about changing our entity names, but about labeling for users. It's a marketing strategy.
But yes, even "document" and "space" have been occasionally misleading.
It is a wiki, but it lets users collaborate. Our users do their jobs in such a wiki, and for __our users__ that means much more than what "wiki" means to them.
You just proved that the wiki word is exactly the right word… :)
What exactly do you see? I see:
"A Web site developed collaboratively by a community of users, allowing any user to add and edit content"
So if this is indeed the correct term, adding a new subwiki, is... "creating a new website"? Do you even know what a "website" means for the average user? Or "content"?
Remember the XWiki (SAS) mottos: work better together, the best way to organize information, free your knowledge... Users do their work collaboratively, they don't just write pages in a wiki. They write in a forum, write review, write press releases, vote, plan, review job candidates, take meeting notes, draw UML diagrams, etc. This is why "wiki" is WRONG for __end users__.
I think that this is not a technical decision, but a marketing/usability one, so it would be better to see what someone from marketing thinks.
I definitely don't agree, sorry… We're building a collaborative solution based on a wiki and as such I definitely don't agree to rename the base concepts of a wiki: pages, spaces, wiki, etc.
Again, when did I ever said that we should rename them? I just said that it would be more intuitive for users to label a virtual wiki as a workspace.
I must say I somehow share this vision ... From the very start, I never had the same perception about sub-wikis and workspaces, even though I knew they mostly shared same technicals (and fundamentally it's the same thing). But in my mind (and it's totally irrationnal), "sub-wikis" are associated to wiki farms, something a bit huge, a bit difficult to put in place, something to host thousands of isolated wikis, something I never really envisaged to put in production for myself. While workspaces is a light collaborative concept, that can be installed from EM in a few clicks, that has a nice and easy UI, and that I started playing with nearly from the start and that I've put in production to manage distinct projects Mail Archives at my office with 5.1.
Of course it might seem stupid, but I can't help but feeling that going back to "wiki" (for naming those kind of subwikis) is like a step back. My users start to get used to seing that "Workspace directory" entry point. And I don't want them to consider these as "wikis", because I don't want them to edit anything (or add manually new pages) in these. Still, they are collaborative (thanks to ratings, comments, activity stream, page sharing, and thanks to its nature of mail archive). But I wouldn't want my users to imagine that it could be nice to add a Blog in this kind of workspace, or use any other wiki feature.
For example, seems the concept of "Space" is taken for granted as basic wiki feature, but maybe I didn't test much of them, but I never heard of this "Space" concept in any other wiki. The fact that it's called a "Space" (and not a group, or a workspace, or a folder, or just anything) is a choice done by XWiki from the start. IMHO, the choice to call a subwiki a "wiki" or a "workspace" is only your choice, and it should be more based on what you want XWiki to be than on what it currently is inside ...
What I can only say on my side, is that I love my XWiki with my workspaces (and eagerly wait for flavours), and I somewhat don't care at all about the wiki farm concept ... Maybe to explain better: - a wiki farm is a set of distinct full-fledged wikis, like a cluster of wikis, with a top-hat admin and container. The container itself has no real interest, apart from grouping things together and providing central navigation - the main wiki + workspaces is a full-fledged wiki, with specialized collaborative places for particular topics, projects, tools, documentation creation ... The main wiki is not just an entry point, it is THE wiki, THE knowledge base, with some satelites graviting around this central planet.
Remember that we're talking here about the base platform. Then there
are
flavors and customizations done by our users which can be anything specific for their project if they want to hide the wiki concepts…
I think you're confusing applications based on xwiki concepts with
core concepts. A subwiki is a core concept in the same manner as a document or a space. What we're doing now is making the notion of subwiki part of the core concepts as it should have been a long time ago (this is why btw it's also in the new model). Again, on top of these core concepts you could create apps for specific uses cases. You could have a workspace app if you want although with the core concepts it's not required ATM since it doesn't add any additional feature...
Rerepeating myself, this isn't about the workspace feature. This isn't about the workspace feature. This is about the XWiki vision, and the XWiki marketing strategy. Is XWiki just a wiki? Or is it much more than that, with collaborative applications as the focus instead of just plain text.
What is XWiki trying to be? How do we present it to our potential users? As a wiki? Or as a platform empowering collaboration? An intranet environment, where employees can do their work better.
Compared to first generation wikis, XWiki is like an atomic bomb next to a hand grenade. Let's not market XWiki as a Bigger Grenade.
And please, read more carefully what I'm actually saying.
Thanks -Vincent
PS: BTW you haven't proposed a good name so far IMO…. At least not one that is better for all use cases. Some might be better for a specific usage of xwiki but not generally speaking.
On 07/30/2013 12:15 PM, Vincent Massol wrote: > > On Jul 30, 2013, at 5:53 PM, Eduard Moraru <[email protected]> wrote: > >> Just my point of view on this point, since I keep seeing similar topics >> popping up once in a while... >> >> For me, the "wiki" is the entire environment (main wiki + all its >> subwikis), as a whole, by definition. Since they are all connected, it is >> wrong to say that we are creating new wikis (subwikis) when, in fact, we >> are just creating new "spaces"/"workspaces" (spaces where the user >> does/groups/catalogues his work). Also, this view is enforced by our new >> direction towards virtual by default and of making subwikis part of XWiki's >> data model (including the new model). > > In the future you'll be able to either: > - create wikis, they are real wikis. > - create nested spaces > > So you'll be able to choose the way you want to organize yourself by either creating a (sub)wiki or a (nested)space. > > The notion of "workspace" is not needed in either case: > - for (sub)wikis, it matches with the notion of a wiki and flavors > - for (nested)space, it matches with the notion of a space + space template (which I guess could also be implemented as a flavor in the future) > >> Since we are currently lacking the hierarchy feature of the the new model, >> and we are faking it technically (and maybe this is where the confusion >> comes from) by using new wikis(subwikis) in new databases, the term >> "workspace" would, IMO, remain the best candidate. > > I don't agree. The "workspace" feature was done ad-hoc outside of the platform and as a consequence was thought as an add-on. Now, what we are doing and preparing for the future is to have the notion of subwiki at the core of XWiki. And this concept of workspace is no longer needed as something adhoc. It can be integrated in the platform. > > What is a workspace: > * it's a set of pages/applications > * using existing users > > Those 2 items can be done without the need for any new name/concept. A set of pages/applications is what we call a flavor. And the notion of users already exists (what we need to work on, is to have a config feature so that a subwiki can have or not have local users). > >> If we consider the fact >> that we want to make workspaces the default (as proven in practice), we >> find that the "corner" cases are actually the term "wiki" (actually >> "subwiki"), which occur only in farm deployments where, indeed, a subwiki >> is a fully fledged and generally isolated "wiki" from the point of view of >> the owner and its users. >> >> Also, in an enterprise environment, try explaining each time to the >> Accounting, Marketing, etc. departments that: >> - a "wiki" is "a set of pages that can be edited/modified by users with >> links between pages, using some syntax, etc."... >> - a "workspace" is "a/the space where you (do *your*) work/collaborate" > > I don't understand. Why have the 2 concepts? The idea of option B is to have only 1 concept: that of (sub)wikis. > >> +1 for "workspace" as first-class term being promoted to users >> +1 for "wiki" as technical term being mentioned in documentation to admins >> (specifically for farm deployments) >> >> Also, being an enterprise wiki, I`m not sure we want to be labelled as the >> company's "wiki" instead of the company's "collaboration tool" (or "tool >> used to get our work done"). >> >> Thanks, >> Eduard >> >> P.S.: As a technical/background note, just not to be misunderstood, indeed, >> a workspace is implemented as just a wiki right now with additional >> restrictions to satisfy its usecase. However, this is only due to our >> platform's limitations. Normally, a workspace should just be a space where >> a user can install apps, create other sub-spaces, and collaborate with >> others. The initial proposal (for the "Wiki 3.0" XWiki SAS research >> project) was to actually use spaces to implement workspaces, but since we >> could not install apps (among other things), we chose to use subwikis >> instead. > > We still need the ability to "Add a new Wiki" in 5.2 so this doesn't change anything. > > And if in the future we support nested spaces then users will also be able to use them + space templates with flavors.
I was also eager to check out this nested spaces feature. But now that I've tasted the workspace/subwikis, I feel that this is really less "important". I even feel, it might bring much more complexity to XWiki, than what it could solve or help doing. Is it really comparable, defining a tree of spaces, and a subwiki/workspace ? In my own (enterprise) use-cases, I always felt that at least one additional level (above spaces) was missing, and I currently use workspaces also for that. But I feel bringing many additional levels + subwikis, might make things even more complex for end users and application writers ... But that's another topic.
> > So for me that makes it even more important to not introduce the notion of "workspaces" in 5.2 and to only have the notion of adding a (sub)wiki :) > > Thanks > -Vincent > >> On Tue, Jul 30, 2013 at 5:29 PM, Vincent Massol < [email protected]> wrote: >> >>> >>> On Jul 30, 2013, at 4:15 PM, Sergiu Dumitriu <[email protected]> wrote: >>> >>>> On 07/30/2013 08:28 AM, Vincent Massol wrote: >>>>> Definitely +1 for B. I really think we need to drop the concept of >>> workspaces and come back to the concept of wiki/subwiki. It's much simpler >>> for the user. What we call "workspace" can be seen as a configuration for a >>> wiki, i.e. the usage of global users only. >>>> >>>> I disagree. For us XWiki veterans it's obvious that an XWiki wiki is an >>>> all-powerful collection of applications and pages that can do anything >>>> we want it to. But for users, a wiki is Wikipedia, where you can find >>>> documentation written by amateurs that's hasn't been proof-read by a >>>> real professional. It takes months or years of using a wiki to shift >>>> from the external viewer bad opinion to the internal collaborator good >>>> opinion of the term "wiki". >>>> >>>> So "wiki" is a bad name for users. I think "workspace" is a much better >>>> name than "wiki", although it's far from perfect. First of all because >>>> it creates confusion between a "space" and a "workspace (wiki)". >>>> >>>> So, what better word describes a "collaboration space" than "workspace"? >>>> >>>> Some random ideas, most of them bad: >>>> - node >>>> - workgroup >>>> - community >>>> - rename space to directory and we can use space or workspace for the >>>> current "wiki" >>>> - virtual server >>>> - environment >>>> - sandbox >>>> - appspace >>>> - office >>>> - location >>>> - rack >>>> - stack >>>> - instance >>>> - room >>>> - workroom >>>> - desk >>> >>> I'm not sure this is needed. XWiki is all about the notion of wiki… even >>> in its name. The generic name "wiki" seems a much better name to me than >>> anything else: >>> * it's a set of pages that can be edited/modified by users with links >>> between pages, using some syntax, etc. >>> >>> I don't think we need to change that. Any other name would be awkward IMO. >>> >>>> Let's not forget that some of the instances are customized so much that >>>> users don't even know they're using a wiki, so just seeing the word >>>> "wiki" might cause confusion: "Wiki? What wiki? I'm using our company's >>>> internal Foobars application!". So it would be a good idea to make this >>>> term configurable. >>> >>> If the instance is customized so much that it doesn't look like a wiki, >>> then whoever did this customization can easily also customize the >>> translation resources to pick whatever suit their needs! ;)
It's not only about customization, even not customized at all, a subwiki might not be used (at all, or partly) as a standard wiki because of its flavour. XWiki is more than just a wiki. Subwikis are more than just subwikis. Still, the "wiki" features are fundamental to XWiki (I believe that), but I'm not sure it's (always/mandatorily) the case for subwikis use-cases.
Maybe that's only resistance to change ;-)
>>> >>> For example, if the wiki is used as a projects wiki and they want to have >>> one project = one wiki, they could rename "Wiki" to "Projects". >>> >>> We'll never be able to use a specialized name by default so we might as >>> well stick with "wiki" which is the best name for what it is… a wiki ;-) >>> >>> Thanks >>> -Vincent
-- Sergiu Dumitriu http://purl.org/net/sergiu _______________________________________________ devs mailing list [email protected] http://lists.xwiki.org/mailman/listinfo/devs
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