Moving pages in Dokuwiki is hard. IMO, that’s the only advantage that Mediawiki or FOSwiki have over Dokuwiki. In every other way, Dokuwiki is superior.

The original reason (purpose for which) that I created this blog was to act as a human-readable change log for my wiki. It then became a journal of my setting up the web server where the blog runs, and thence into a journal of my personal attempts at transformation. Today I have a major change to report about the wiki.

At some point, I got this brilliant idea that the project on which the wiki focuses could be thought of like a war. That’s a stupid analogy, because it’s really the exact opposite of a war, but structurally, it works: you have a known, defined end goal, a general strategy, plans for specific battles, situations, and circumstances, and tactics used on the ground in order to produce specific results.

So I created new namespaces for strategies, plans, and tactics, and then spent several hours putting things where they go. It became clear that a couple of other categories would also be needed: Resources, and Ground Rules. A few pages are still homeless.

Something cool happened, almost accidentally. I added brief descriptions of most of the tactics, plus a few other things. These descriptions are exciting, to me at least. My hope is that someone reading the descriptions would want to know more about what they were reading about. “Resolve something that didn’t go my way, quickly and satisfactorily? Sign me up!”

There is only one strategy, though it is in parts, and is always changing. It’s a view from a great distance of how to get from what exists now, to a world that works for everyone, and it’s made of plans.

Plans are situational: they are appropriate for some situations and irrelevant to others. One plan might be to write a book about transformation of a corporation. Another might be a book, or a lecture, or a series of seminars, or something else I’m failing to imagine. (I really hope that there are lots of plans I’m failing to imagine. Books, lectures, and seminars will only get to so many places.) Plans consist of tactics: that is, every plan uses a few tactics in order to succeed.

Tactics are the actions that can be taken immediately, to produce immediate results. Two of my blog posts (Priorities and The Past Doesn’t Exist) are tactics that can be used to get things done. Different situations call for different tactics, obviously.

The lack of organization on the wiki has been a subtle inhibitor to progress. While this was a lot of work, it has really elucidated what tasks should take priority, and at the same time, highlighted the strengths and utility of what exists now. It is almost in a place where reading it is understandable, enjoyable, and above all, useful.