[wiki-standards] Time for a real wiki standard!!!

[Mike Haseler]

Chuck Smith wrote:
> Hi Mike,
> 
> First of all, I want to say that I like your passion, and I understand
> your critiques of Creole.  I led the project and worked on it
> part-time for a year.  I think the biggest problem was that I tried to
> please everyone.  I think we all know the saying "You can please some
> people all of the time, or you can please all people some of the time,
> but you can never please all people all the time."  It's funny you
> mentioned cat herding, because I started the WikiCreole workshop at
> WikiSym with the famous EDS ad about cat herding.
> 
> Now, with that out of the way, I've since started a new job at a web
> startup in Berlin which takes an extraordinary amount of my time and
> so I don't get to follow projects like Creole and direct the community
> as I'd like.  So, let's step back.  If you were in my shoes a couple
> of years ago and you were going to lead the WikiCreole project, what
> would you have done differently?  I know I'm getting a bit theoretical
> here, but I'm wondering what you would concretely do.
> 
> Best wishes,
> Chuck
> 
Chuck,

it would be cheating for me to say what I would have done, partly 
because I did an MBA and know all the buzz phrases to imply I would have 
done something better.

The real problem of a project like this is to get the buy in from 
multiple stakeholders who already have established positions and who see 
little personal interest in seeing the project succeed.

After all, once a user has learnt one wiki they are to some extent tied 
into that use BY THE VERY FACT OF THE COMPLEXITY OF MOVING TO ANOTHER 
wiki/application.

Whilst the obvious aim would be to get the support of the established 
applications, it is not a strategy that is likely to succeed.

Personally, whilst I would have publically kept the established 
applications "in the loop" I would almost have ignored them because 
however supportive they think they are, their entrenched positions 
doesn't make them able or willing to make the compromises that are 
necessary to achieve a single standard.

Instead, I would have concentrated on new application writers who having 
no established preference of the actual standard and therefore would be 
willing to quickly come to the best common standard rather than the 
lowest common denominator.

Also, with no dominant market position, the new applications would see 
the "industry standard" common markup specification as a Unique selling 
point that would allow them to take "market" from the established players.

Eventually, as the number of new applications increase and more and more 
people adopt the standard, the  established players would begin to 
realise that they are loosing market share because they are not 
compliant and they would eventually be forced to adopt the standard 
which everyone adopted years ago.

==============================================

My own experience of writing specifications, is that everyone wants to 
comment on the most trivial matters which seem to take forever to decide 
what was obvious from the beginning, and then when it comes to a really 
difficult bit of the spec which is critical to the effective running of 
the equipment .... suddenly all those people who have so much to say 
about how long a button should be pressed .... they have more important 
things than the spec to discuss.

So, if you want to write a decent specification, just start writing it, 
leave in enough harmless "bait" to ensure that those who feel they must 
comment on every spec in some way have something to comment about and 
debate ad nosia allowing them to eventually think that they wrote the 
spec and thereby they gain ownership and buy-in to the spec that was 
really written by a core team with only a very few minor changes by the 
busy bodies MBAs in management.

Mike