A complete rewrite of wiki as a single page application

This is based on the Smallest Federated Wiki Ward Cunningham has been working on since 2011. I think it's great that they're moving to new architecture, and the SFW looks great. The interface is still pretty arcane, though.

I believe the wiki is among the most amazing things to come out of the web (and think Cunningham is a genius for inventing it, or discovering it, or whatever process made it happen), and I can't count the number of times I've lost an hour or two spelunking into the C2 wiki.

But, I'm having a hard time making sense of this UI. The panels popping up seemingly infinitely into the right side of the screen (every click makes a new panel) is unfamiliar and doesn't seem to provide a compelling value over giving the content a valuable piece of center page real estate. It feels like it is too proud of its cleverness, and that detracts from its value.

And, some other nitpicks: The "fork this page" feature uses a flag icon...which means "flag this" to any one who has ever seen a flag. The flashing icons at the bottom of every page, representing every edit throughout history, is hella distracting, and again makes the content play second fiddle to something else going on. There is no way to discover this thing in anything resembling an ordered fashion. Most of the links on the "front" page (I guess?) are dead ends, recent changes provides pages that have content but provide a haphazard approach to understanding what I'm looking at. The neat thing about a wiki is historically that you start in one place, and can follow links back and forth until you grasp your subject. In this case, the links seem to have taken a backseat to the other stuff (which is made up of flashing things, poorly chosen icons, and weird gradient squares that seem to exist for no reason), leaving me hanging here with no idea what this thing is for and how it works.

It pains me to say it, as c2 is wonderful (a little dated and simplistic, sure, but the world's first of anything doesn't need to be beautiful). Maybe it'll come to make more sense with time and further contribution from people who know what it is and why it is.

The wiki I know for telling me all the new cool stuff is junk switches to a SPA? That's ironic.

But seriously, in my eyes, a wiki is excatly what a SPA should not be used for, because of its document based nature. Trying to fix an overload problem with an SPA tackles the problem from the wrong side imho.

I'm both sad and enjoyed by the move. I'm attached to the deceiptively poor old wiki, because it contrasts with the great content quality. At the same time, they're migrating toward something off the map of current technologies, and so the spirit of the first wikiwikiweb is still alive.

ps: if someone has an archive / mirror of c2.com, I'll be happy to leech.

"deceiptively poor old wiki, because it contrasts with the great content quality"

Does that remind anyone else of HN? I sort of rather like the lack of features on HN in the same way that I like c2.com.