Playing around with wikis in general (I have installed and evaluated Xwiki, mediawiki, and Twiki, before coming to DominoWiki) got me to thinking about similarities and differneces with Notes and why was I doing this to begin with. A wiki is nothing more than a type of content management system. If a wiki is just a 'poor cousin' to Notes, why all the clamor? A few reasons:

• Wiki's are typically page oriented - They are web sites first, data repositiories second.
  
  
  
• Notes (typically) displays arbitrarily organized lists of documents. Arbitrary is from the point of view of the user - obviously each view has a function. The problem is that notes is 'view centric' by default. It's not always appropriate to present a view.
  
  
  
  Wiki's keep things from getting lost because new content is created by making a link from an already existing page. A self organizing, logical structure evloves over time.
  
  
  
  Wikis make it easy to link documents. This has always been harder than it has to be in Notes. I've never understood the reason why this has never been meaningfully addressed.
  
  
  
• Wiki's are more of a blank template - most of our Notes databases have a fixed list of views. It's difficult to use an old database in a new situation without going to your friendly designer/ admin for a change.
  
  
  
• Every document can be commented on, discussed and has version history.
  
  
  
• My company has a very bad habit of squirreling away most information in Notes inside attachments. This is just so stupid I can't get over it. It's a battle I've been fighting for years and to this day I have no idea why we do this to ourselves.
  
  
  
  
  
  I still think we need Notes over the standard wiki's that are out there for a few important reasons:
  
  
  
• Most wiki's have access privilege features, but they don't have anywhere near the security of Notes
  
• How do you set up 100 (non-Notes) private & secure wikis for 100 different projects at a company? Painfully.
  
• There is a place for databases of the form we have built and maintained to date, however, we also need some that are more unconstrained.
  
  
  
  Should all notes databases exhibit some of these features?