Thoughts on Twiki

I'm not too happy about the choice of TWiki -- I find it overly complex
(e.g. the hacker-style curly braces navigation bar with cryptic links
like "Ref-By", "Diffs", "r1.4", the Bugzilla-style search page, the
feature overload ..) and not very user-friendly. The requirement of
registration impedes the natural experimentation that leads users to
explore the wiki concept -- the GuestAccount seems like a hack. AbiWord,
a fairly large project, uses TWiki, and the wiki is hardly used at all. 
It's a hacker-wiki, those who like complexity will cherish it, but many
others will simply be overwhelmed.

It's good to know that CamelCase won't be required, but allowing both
link patterns can result in chaos if there are no clear guidelines. Some
users will use CamelCase when they find it convenient, for example, to
link to user pages, or to words that can be easily wikified such as
MicroSoft; others will not. A mess of different style links and pages
may result. This further complicates the wiki concept for a newbie.  Is
there a requirement to create a CamelCase username? That would be bad.

What is TWiki's free links syntax? If it is too complex, it will
likewise encourage people to use CamelCase.

There are two things that should definitely be done:

1) Reduce CamelCase by policy or by technology to very few cases, or
entirely eliminate it (should not be too hard). CamelCase provides no
serious advantages and only makes the entire wiki harder to read (it is
also not reliably convertible to anything else). CamelCase is a *very*
*bad* *idea* and it is time to recognize it as such.

2) Make Twiki's navigation bar user friendly. For example, instead of

. { Home | Welcome | Register | Changes | Topics | Index | Search |

make it something simple like

    Homepage | Introduction | Create Account | Recent Changes 

Why would I want the "Go" entryfield so prominently placed and not a
simple title&body search? That doesn't make sense.

Regards,

Erik

-- 
FOKUS - Fraunhofer Insitute for Open Communication Systems
Project BerliOS - http://www.berlios.de

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