I think that if search worked, the Wiki could be a great hub of information.
For the search to work, it should make an effort to get to know you, that is, try to track which pages you have previously edited or opened, or maybe it could access information about which project you are currently assigned to in JIRA or which internal repositories you have recently committed to in git. Also, which pages are popular, which pages are mainteined, etc. This would enable its search engine to filter bubble you and provide far better results that I currently see Confluence doing.
Further, it should be able to contain pages which are just indexed mirrors of other resources. Some pages could be simply uneditable mirrors of markdown files in your repository, making it possible for developers to keep documentation alongside the code if this makes more sense to them. Other pages could be mirrors of Word documents or Excel sheets of PDF files on shared drives or where the company likes to keep this stuff. All of this stuff would be thoroughly indexed by the wiki and would show up in search results.
So I guess what I'm proposing is that wikis become an aggregator of information more than a single store of information. And that they really, really nail the search part.
Yeah, I probably did. The "personal filter bubble" thing is very much how google does it. I don't know the details about pagerank but I imagine that they are constantly tweaking their secret sauce to increase revenue and that they would rather keep the juicy parts secret than having them described in details in a patent.
Also, I'd imagine that other search engines, such as Bing, have developed similar algorithms although I'm sure thay take great care not to infringe upon the pagerank patent.
Disclaimer: Purely conjecture on my part. No particular knowledge of patent law, and only a high level understanding of the pagerant algorithm.
For the search to work, it should make an effort to get to know you, that is, try to track which pages you have previously edited or opened, or maybe it could access information about which project you are currently assigned to in JIRA or which internal repositories you have recently committed to in git. Also, which pages are popular, which pages are mainteined, etc. This would enable its search engine to filter bubble you and provide far better results that I currently see Confluence doing.
Further, it should be able to contain pages which are just indexed mirrors of other resources. Some pages could be simply uneditable mirrors of markdown files in your repository, making it possible for developers to keep documentation alongside the code if this makes more sense to them. Other pages could be mirrors of Word documents or Excel sheets of PDF files on shared drives or where the company likes to keep this stuff. All of this stuff would be thoroughly indexed by the wiki and would show up in search results.
So I guess what I'm proposing is that wikis become an aggregator of information more than a single store of information. And that they really, really nail the search part.