Ask HN: YC S10 startup wants your opinions about wikis

We're a incoming YC team exploring online collaboration tools and workflows. We're working on something completely different, but are running into the same annoyances managing shared information that we've experienced before in other teams. We already know about basecamp, sharepoint, etherpad, unfuddle, jotspot, pbwiki, google sites/wave, chatter, solutions mentioned in previous HN posts(1) and wikimatrix.org... But amazingly, nothing seems to fit quite right.

We're wondering if there's room for something light & inspiring, like github and posterous are for their respective tasks. We've found one key driver to a successful collaboration experience is how effectively it integrates into your workflow, which for us means email. Few tools seem to do this well without being heavyweight.

Most people we've talked to are passionate one way or another, and we've enjoyed the discussion. Some of the questions we've asked are:

1. What type of projects have you used wikis/shared documents for? How many readers and writers were involved?

2. Think of a specific project where a wiki or was invaluable. What made it work?

3. What didn't work? Was it an issue with the collaboration process, tool or ... ??

4. What was the typical workflow like for you? What were the pain points? How would you have done it differently?

5. What is the minimum set of features that would be required to be useful?

Tell us your thoughts. We would be happy to clean up & publish the results if it would be helpful for others (we'll do this if there are sufficient responses to warrant this, say, 50)

(1) Previous HN posts about wikis:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49440 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1257106 http://apps.ycombinator.com/item?id=371133 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=569189

We always (eventually) run into problems with Wikis, since we always end up with huge PDF or XLS files that we want to add to wikis.

Currently, we are using Dropbox as a replacement for our wiki

For me there is always an "overlap" problem with "infotools" like todo lists, issue trackers, wikis, google notebook etc. And in my case, they're always competing with email, which is hard to beat.

Suppose I have an idea for a neat new feature for my product. What do I do? Write an email to the others, or put it on my todo list, or on a shared todo list, or create a feature request on the issue tracker, or write it in a wiki, or write it in google notebook, or just write it in todo.txt...?

In the end, I use email for most things and google notebook for personal notes. I also carry Moleskine for when I'm not in front of the computer.

Since you asked about collaboration, I think an ideal tool would somehow integrate with email (gmail), because clearly email is not going away for another x years.

Also, I think the quick descent of Wave into also-ran status shows that "fancy" collaboration sounds good, but even if the initial reactions are super-favorable (I used GW for weeks and even wrote a blog post about it), email prevails! Hence my suggestion to integrate with email.

I'm skeptical that a wiki is still a sensible angle in this day and age.

I've used plenty of them (and like them for tech centric documentation) but let's be honest; they never quite caught on in a business context.

This is most certainly not due to a shortage of implementations (wikimatrix lists 124, no less) nor due to a lack of user-friendlyness (markup-free WYSIWYG ui's are dime a dozen now, from pbwiki to google pages).

I would rather claim that there is simply a fundamental impedance mismatch between the wiki concept and the common workflow in most companies.

Like it or not (disclaimer: I certainly don't), most workflows are still dominated by Word and Excel documents. Those don't mix well with a wiki, in fact they don't mix at all.

Moreover once you enter this battle you'll find yourself not only competing with the friendly closet fileserver ("Just drop it on drive Z:, Sue") and E-Mail ("I'll mail you the new version in a minute") but also with the ilk of MS Sharepoint, Mindtouch and a truckload of other workflow solutions that more or less "work", but most importantly usually allow the users to stick with their beloved MS Office suite.

Anyways, to make a long story short; instead of beating a dead horse yet again, why not look at the ideas that have caught on in the meantime?

Those would be the whole 37signals stuff (basecamp), dropbox, and I guess you also have to count pivotal tracker into that bucket (as much as I despise it personally). What most of these seem to have in common is the "do only one thing and do it well" approach, as opposed to the old "one tool to rule them all" meme.

So, my humble opinion would be that there's still tons of low hanging fruit in the latter market. A wiki on the other hand... Well, perhaps impl #125 will finally part the users from their Excel. But tbh, I wouldn't bet on it. YMMV. ;-)

There's Wikipedia, and then there's wikis.

Wikipedia is an awesome resource because hundreds if not thousands of people every day actually collaborate on it. There are a few big public wikis that are like this, too, but Wikipedia's the main one. Of course, Wikipedia has a toxic and idiotic culture, but they wrote a not-bad encyclopedia. That's fine.

Wikis, on the other hand, are usually just a repository for single-author documents which are, at best, sparsely updated by that single author when he is bored. They don't spin up to full collaborative potential if they're just a documentation repository for a group that has real work to do. They're just another bin of poorly updated documentation.