wicked wiki week two

Despite currently suffering from CCC (Christmas Cookie Coma) and a bit of general hum-buggedness (you know that's a word, really should be anyway) I did my homework. It DIDN'T help the mood issues, but I'm now recovered enough to report back--the swearing has subsided to a dull roar now.

So I went into the Technical Services page and added the info that we are not IT--since periodically that is forgotten and we get phone calls/emails about computer problems. I also linked to the staff web page, the TS portion of the staff page network (or labyrinth or whatever), and to the wiki page I created about spine label formats called (creatively enough) spine label formats.

This created page was the bane of my morning. These wiki pages are great to just add paragraphs or lists, but for stuff that needs careful formatting--it BITES BIG ROCKS. See, the thing is that spine labels have a stack of information in a specific way. So to give information about how things need to look--they need to look that way.

So here's how it went: copy out of Word file; go into editing page and paste; look at wiki page; swearing starts--OK, I'll skip the blow-by-blow (since "swearing starts" would end up being frequently inserted). Basically, it looked awful. I tried to see if I could get the sidebar off this page (help was not helpful; web search info gave me code, but it didn't work--it seems that the more you pay to do the wiki, the better editing capabilities you have).

Once I resigned myself to the sidebar I commenced editing manually to make it look good. This was incredibly frustrating because the edit mode and read mode look absolutely different. I tried to put screenshot here, but can't seem to get that to work. You'll either have to just believe me or go look and compare the pretty and the really weird (edit mode) on the wiki page.

Basically I just think this is probably not the place for this. I got it done but it was frustrating and could easily be screwed up by anyone. It's not the kind of thing that needs a bunch of people screwing around with it. On the page I did also upload and attach a file version that you can click on and a Word document will show the info for printing or whatever purposes. I also put a link back to the TS page just for handiness.

I think the concept of the wiki is fine and will work for some things--stuff that needs more revising, but like all tools...use the right tool for the job. My brain is a bit fried from fighting with it so I'm having some trouble imagining exact uses beyond what I mentioned last time (events calendars and such). I do still have the lingering mistrust for how easily it can be abused--I realize it's supposed to be self-policing, but how often are people going to have to monitor it and how much time will it take/waste vs. the other ways we have of disseminating information? I'm a bit concerned that some of this is progress for its own sake. Rather than the technology meeting an existing need, are we attempting to find a use for some of this stuff just because it's neat? Just because we can do something doesn't mean we need to do it (I bring up the fashions of several decades as proof...oh, and stuff like cloning fits too).

On that pleasant note (the cloning) I'm back to my hole.