Here we record a theme by Brian Marick and a response by mike hales.
See also: the 'howto' pages noted below by mike.
Brian Marick posted
In August 2025 Brian posted in the wiki.cage General matrix room: https://matrix.to/#/!MzBFmibrmeuampVsRX:matrix.org/$TPq_D6OIpbzQwrkKmqeSXslzSUuPwZ4dCC9VoCen1Cs
mike picked up
> @brianmarick > You could offer "Fedwiki Classic" and "Reader-Centric Fedwiki".
August 18th Hi @brianmarick Two things . .
# Reading in wiki One: If you look at my approaches to 'howto' in wiki.cafe, you can see that 'Reading in wiki' is one of the three frames, alongside 'Writing in wiki' and 'Collaborating in wiki'. So I'm appreciating and welcoming your angle here. https://howto.wiki.foprop.org https://makewiki.wiki.cafe/making-wiki-work.html https://cafefaq.wiki.cafe/wikicafe-faq.html https://mhbasics.wiki.cafe/basics.html
# wiki UI Two: The UI in wiki is definitely difficult. And @Christian Galo for example is keen to develop it.
At the same time I deeply appreciate the elegant hacker-programmer aesthetic that Ward & co have put into the tooling, with 'secret' keystrokes, scantily documented hard to find tools, hidden manipulators' arts and long hands-on apprenticeship
I also deeply value the desktop/drag-&-drop UI metaphor and feel too many explicit buttons and popups makes things idiot-like and klunky in the name of idiot-proofing and user friendliness.
So I'm for UI expansion. But I feel 'user friendliness' - especially for writers as distinct from readers - needs to walk a very delicate line.
# wiki.cafe is for users Oh third: I'm the originator of wiki.cafe, in the sense that I invited Christian, @robert.best and @3wc ~ they/themto populate a space that would become a coop that would offer wiki hosting. I'm very happy they're in that space, holding that space 🙂
I stopped being a member of the operational team a year ago, and am now 'just a user'. But my rationale was, to open the enormous possibility of wiki to folks who never ever want to see a command line, run a Unix shop or admin a server.
Now that wiki.cafe has a bunch of users, of already diverse and demanding kinds, this is beginning to put sand in the oyster, and maybe the pearls will start forming in a year-or-three 😉
Thanks for being A User. > Users are what wiki.cafe is for - basic writers, advanced writers, collaborators and even readers-only.