Practical Wiki-craft
After finishing the last case study I worked on for Baseline, I was ready to quit. The story was a lot harder to write than it should have been; we had split up the story into components, and in the end we had lots of repetitive content and no clean transitions between each of the parts. So, we killed ourselves doing the integration.
The task was made more difficult by the fact that my co-author is in San Jose, I’m in Baltimore, and our editors are in Manhattan. The workflow was entirely e-mail based; we were constantly sending pieces of drafts to each other, and no one ever had the full picture
of what was going on.
So, as we began to plan our next story, I decided I was going to take back control of my life and fix the collaboration problem. Our problems would seem to be the perfect fit for something like Groove, or eRoom, I suppose. But really, all we needed was a simple collaborative space where everything for the next story would live–contact lists, interview notes, and a single working draft of the story and its major subcomponents.
We needed, I concluded, a Wiki.
So, I did what any good technology journalist would do–I stole one, er leveraged existing work. I took the sample Wiki application from the MacPython distribution (thanks, Jack), made some relatively minor modifications to the code (like changing the storage directory to something other than /tmp), and slapped it up on my web host in a password-protected directory.
So far, so good. I’ve evangelized the Wiki a bit with my editors and co-author, and they all seem to think it’s a good idea. Considering it will give the editors an instant view on the progress of our next story, including the working draft, and that they can post questions and comments directly into the draft for us to respond to, I don’t see what there is about this for them not to like.
Now all I have to do is get them all to use it. While 123 lines of Python code on some insignificant BSD box may not revolutionize journalism, they may at least make my life more tolerable. And who knows? We might actually get a better story next time as a result. I’ll post updates here on our progress.