Several setup and usability issues

[richardbatty]

I love the federated wiki as an idea, it perfectly suits my use case of building up a personal and professional collaborative knowledgebase. But I've found it very hard to get started, and I expect many other potential users will find it hard as well.

I'm going to list the specific difficulties I have had so that you have something to act on if you'd like to improve the situation. This is going to look like a huge set of complaints, but what I'm trying to do is to show how difficult it is for a new user. I suspect a concerted effort to improve the newcomer experience would help a lot, and I'm happy to help with that.

It's unclear what the federated wiki is or what it's for

It's naturally going to be a little difficult for a newcomer to understand it because the SFW is quite a different way of thinking about the web and about writing for it. However, the introductory pages don't help very well with this. http://fed.wiki.org/view/welcome-visitors doesn't explain it, and neither does the most promising link on that page, "How to wiki". "Frequently asked questions" doesn't help much either. The videos are the closest thing to an introduction, but come at it from a broader almost philosophical point of view rather than showing what it is and what sort of things you could use it for.

It's unclear how to get started

Once I was interested enough in the wiki, my next thought was 'How can I start using it?' I looked for a 'create an account' or 'sign in' button, and there isn't one. I noticed from browsing around that different people had different subdomains, but could find no way of creating one. After many hours I finally found that you could type in any subdomain in and then claim it using the OpenID bar at the bottom of the wiki. I tried clicking the G button after I realised it stood for Google, and then I got an error page "Trouble starting OpenID Did you enter a proper endpoint?". So no luck there.

I'd also tried npm installing the wiki and then running it locally. That worked fine, although this is really only something programmers are going to be able/willing to do. And I'd still rather not run it locally.

Editing is unintuitive

I found a few issues with editing:

• It's not clear how to get formatting within a paragraph, e.g. if you want bullet points or a header. The documentation says use tags like <h3> but this doesn't work.
• If you use markdown and have multiple paragraphs in one block, it displays with no line break between the paragraphs.
• There isn't a quick way to create a new paragraph. Pressing return twice from within a paragraph doesn't do it so instead you have to click +, and double click on the resulting block, which interferes with the flow of writing.
• In general, editing controls aren't discoverable. If the editor had a conventional toolbar with e.g. 'bold', 'header', 'link' buttons on it it would be much easier.

It looks like a research project

These issues come together to create the impression of being a research project or an open source project that isn't interested in attracting users. This is worrying from a user's point of view. It makes me think that it might randomly stop being worked on or that I might keep finding more and more problems as I go on using it.

[WardCunningham]

These issues are all true. Pokemon makes us all look like duffers.

I look forward to the day that these issues are all addressed. However, my more immediate concern is to preserve what progress we have already made by the continual ratcheting up of what it means to provide a service. The withdrawal of first OpenID by Google and now Persona by Mozilla has kept us hopping. We now add registering with GitHub, Twitter or Google for identity and will soon add something equally complicated for SSL/TLS support.

[coevolving]

@richardbatty As someone who would prefer to be a "power user" rather than a "software developer", I agree with your assessments. I've been playing with this evolving technology for some years, and am encouraged by the openness to ideas.

On the first point of "It's unclear what the federated wiki is or what it's for", I think that people will only being to appreciate it after a community has adopted the technology, so that multiple slightly different versions of wiki pages will concurrently exist. This is definitely counter to the Wikipedia "neutral point of view" approach, so there is some learning involved there.

On the second point of "It's unclear how to get started" and third point on "Editing is unintuitive", it's possible that the interface could be enhanced. I'm curious what a professional interaction designer would recommend. I've recently inherited a MacBook Pro, and have been learning a lot about how "simple" can be really "difficult" in the Apple environment (having spent practically the past decade in Ubuntu Linux). This has led me to revisit "How Apple Is Giving Design A Bad Name" | Don Norman and Bruce Tognazzini | Nov. 10, 2015 | Fast CoDesign at https://www.fastcodesign.com/3053406/how-apple-is-giving-design-a-bad-name .

My general direction has been to think that I'll need to get novices onto a wiki farm first, and then may to migrate them onto their own domains. For novice bloggers, I generally suggest that they start first writing on the hosted wordpress.com for free (so that they first focus on writing content over choose themes and style sheets), and then migrate the blog content to a self-hosted Wordpress site if they really taking to blogging. Perhaps a similar approach might be better for Federated Wiki.

[WardCunningham]

David suggests a good read. The article makes a point about Apple and then backs it up. We are equally guilty. Substitute Federated Wiki for Apple in the statement: "Apple products deliberately hide complexity by obscuring or even removing important controls."

I've suggested that some of our problems will be solved by good touch design and then retrofitted into the desktop experience. The article makes me suspect we could do better following a different path.

Hardly a week goes by where I don't discover some useful attribute of wiki that was not designed in. Where do these come from? Not ethnographic research. They could be described as "happy accidents" but I suspect there is more to it than that.

http://about.fed.wiki

Here I describe some of what we have found. We're more than a research project because we are uniquely useful right now as is. By analogy we might be at the maturity level of the Apple II as it broke free of the Homebrew Club. We have yet to recognize a Jef Raskin to lead us forward.

[richardbatty]

Thankyou both for your responses.

http://about.fed.wiki is helping me understand much better what SFW is about. I'm still confused about some aspects of it (especially around federation) but it's getting clearer. And I can see the maturity level - there's still a lot of exploration to be done about what this kind of platform can be used for, but it's mature enough to be used.

On log in: It looks like you're working on this.

On usability and editing problems: Once I've spent some more time using the system I'll see if I can contribute some fixes for these issues. The article about apple is helpful on this front.

On documentation: Again, once I've got the hang of things I'll try improving the various intro guides to help beginners.

@coevolving You said that "people will only being to appreciate it after a community has adopted the technology, so that multiple slightly different versions of wiki pages will concurrently exist". I'm involved in a community that I think could be very interested in using SFW. It's the Effective Altruism community, which is focussed on the question "How can we use our resources, such as money and time, to to help others the most?". This involves a great deal of in-depth technical thinking and debate, but currently people in the community do this through an awkward mixture of blog posts, blog post comment threads, google docs, and Facebook threads. Once I've seen whether SFW can work for my research needs, I'll see if I can get others in the effective altruism community interested in it by demonstrating how I've used it.

[pijokela]

Hello, I am trying to install SFW on my laptop with Ubuntu. I was about to create a new issue, but this one is so close that I will add my comment here instead.

This simple instruction does not work:

$ npm install -g wiki
$ wiki

npm install finishes without errors, packages are added under ~/.npm, but a command called "wiki" is not available. Am I supposed to use sudo? (I tried that and it didn't help.) I have seen many installation guides, but they are all old and I have no idea of how to actually do the installation.

$ node -v
v6.11.0
$ npm -v
3.10.10

[andysylvester]

I had a similar problem when installing wiki under Ubuntu. I had to install the package nodejs-legacy. See the following page for more details :

Http://fedwiki.andysylvester.com/view/welcome-visitors/view/journal-2017/view/new-user-setup

Andy Sylvester

[paul90]

Did you follow the node install instructions on https://nodejs.org/en/download/package-manager/#debian-and-ubuntu-based-linux-distributions? This adds an extra distribution source for installing node, rather than using the official debian repo.

There is some background available from https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2012/07/msg00002.html

[pijokela]

• The node from Ubuntu repos is too old, I used @paul90 instructions to get node 6.11.
• After this npm "install -g wiki" as normal user failed and I had to run it as root.
• Now I have a working SWF on my laptop! Thank you!
• I will now look at the @andysylvester instructions in more detail.

[WardCunningham]

We have updated How to Wiki with a couple of more recently authored guides. New sites should get this version automatically.

The above links draw from these two sites.

http://about.fed.wiki/
http://hello.ward.bay.wiki.org/

The about site tries to answer common questions without linking too far into the federation while the hello site's goal is to send you to interesting place. I would love to see additional chapters added to the field guide representing other people's interests.