PBwacky is a dumb title, but I’m using it anyway

I’m entirely submerged in wiki-ness. Between my Social Software: Blogs, Wikis & More workshop and my Using Wikis in the Classroom workshop, I’m not only evaluating, examining and playing around with wikis, I’m also using wikis. The content for both workshops is based in PBWiki but I’ve convinced myself to start up practice Wetpaint and Wikispaces wikis. Needless to say, I’m having dreams about wikis. Not good dreams either.

PBwiki has been my wiki of choice, mostly because that was the first one I came across, way back when. I’ve always been pretty fond of it, but the more I use it and the more I try to do with it, the more frustrated I become. Their much touted Point-and-Click editor saves you the trouble of learning the modest code required for formatting, but I would argue that it actually plays a mean trick on you by pretending to be user-friendly with its familiar MS Office-style buttons and wysiwyg pretentions. Here’s a challenge for you to get a sense of what I’m on about– create a PBwiki page with bullet points. Save it. Then open it up and try to add a couple more bullets. Try to put your additions somewhere in the middle of you existing list. Gaah! I’ve learned to undo my formatting, make my changes, then redo my formatting almost as a second nature, but it’s an unfortunate thing to have to do and not at all newbie friendly, actually.

These are all just bits and pieces, really. My largest complaint has come from my free Gold-upgraded wiki. PBwiki, I have to say, is pretty great when it comes to educational wikis. Not only do they have ad-free spaces, but they have a lot of support in the form of discussion boards and this great Presenters Pack– the source of my free wiki. I got some great info and three free Gold wiki upgrades just for telling PBwiki that I planned on using a wiki in a presentation. Naturally, I upgraded my own wiki first.

So the Gold wiki gave me a few new skins to play with, additional storage and more security features. Good stuff! It also gave me a headache. I’m a Firefox user. I create all my wiki content using Firefox and view everything on Firefox. One day I checked my sparkly new Gold wiki on a public terminal on the library using IE. There were all these crazy bits of code in my pages. I went back to my Firefox — no crazy code. It was only in IE. I switched to code view in my editor and removed the IE-unique code, then thought, this is a pain in the arse. What if it keeps happening? Will I have to hand-remove renegade code from my wiki every time I make changes? After some unsatisfactory back-and-forth with PBwiki tech support, the answer came back, “yes.” WTF? The tech guy had no answers, no helpful suggestion (”well, you could just remove the code by hand every time you edit it”) and to add to the annoyingness of it all, he insisted, in our email correspondence, to refer to me by my last name.

Okay. It was a free upgrade. I could make the changes easily. No one was injured and I caught the wackiness before I presented with the wiki. But come on! Why would I have more problems with the Premium wiki, than the regular old free one? What if I had paid good money for the upgrade? What about folks who are gung-ho about PBwiki, pay their own hard-earned cash and have no idea how to edit in code-view? And they offered me so little help/sympathy/explanations. Poo on you, PBwiki.

I’m definitely not married to PBwiki anymore. I really like Wetpaint’s many many skins and their Easy Edit feature is ultra wysiwyg– there’s no behind-the-scenes editing page– and might be even more user-friendly than our peanut buttery friends. As proof, I offer the wiki that I created for my family’s collective Christmas list– my sister, my dad and my mom have all contributed to it. They’re so wikitastic and they don’t even realize it!

Maybe PBwiki has the educational wiki market cornered, but they I hope they put some of their constant development efforts into making their products actually easy to use, not just apparently easy to use.