After all these years of doing a blog about lexicon, I realized that blogs are not the best format for nomenclature. The best web tool for lexicon is…the Wiki. This is so for a lot of reasons. The main reason is simple. Wikipedia. Wikipedia is so pervasive in the minds of Internet users that it is the undisputed king for all things related to community-based definitions. As a result, Wiki’s rule for lexicon and nomenclature. Since I advocate to all of my customers that they first establish a lexicon for their core competence, industry and technology. I decided to spend a little time starting my own wiki and choosing which one I like. Since my friend
Pamela Dingle has so kindly provided a hosting account at
Dreamhost, I decided just to use the Dreamhost default wiki. MediaWiki. After all MediaWiki is the same software that Wikipedia is based on. Problem solved. NOT. Pamela was also so kind to begin explaining the incredible state of MediaWiki. To Dreamhost’s credit, the “Oneclick Installs” seemed very straightforward. The MediaWiki oneclick install I did still doesn’t work. No clue yet how to make it work. Further Pamela let me know about the dismal state of MediaWiki. I won’t go through the whole thing with you, just an example. You can’t delete a user from the MediaWiki database. Administration is—shall we say—primitive. The advantage of MediaWiki is that it looks just like Wikipedia. This of course is because Wikipedia is built on MediaWiki. I am sure that the Wikipedia folks have developed an entire set of stuff to administer the Wikipedia site. We don’t have those tools on hand. The tools that are on hand, suck. I won’t be using MediaWiki, I am on a quest to find the best wiki I can find for myself and my customers. I will let you know how this goes. If you have any suggestions about your favorite wiki, please let me know.