First off, an observation of wierd - I realised that I was getting account notices from Telstra-Clear, from whom I get cable modem access. One of them was in credit $170, and had a direct debit attached to it; one of them was $212 in debt, and had a page about my cable modem.
Now, let me make this clear - they were both for the same person (me), and the same address. So I rang up to clarify what was going on. After negotiating the voice-activated section, and several chapters on hold, I got through to an actual person, who grasped the problem fairly quickly... and then put me on hold for another half-chapter or so while they found out what they could do for me.
Which was, as it turns out, send me another direct debit form.
What they had been enquiring about was whether they could transfer the direct debit authority between accounts belonging to the same person. Apparently the answer is "no", which is understandable. I did ask whether the debt and the service could be transferred over to the account with the direct debit already set up - but no, apparently that account was deactivated, and reactivating it would be very hard indeed.
So - I'm waiting for (yet another) direct debit form to arrive, which I will then fill out and send off to them, at which point they'll start letting me pay them.
***
David asked a question about how we use Wiki at Weta. The answer, I guess, is - sporadically. ;)
We're in a slightly different situation from many organizations, in that the majority of the company is fairly computer-savy. There are some exceptions, particularly on the more administrative side, but the bulk of the artists have a fair bit of computer nous, since many of them have to do at least some simple scripting for their toos. In fact, the first Weta wikis were set up by one of the departments (Compositing(, to keep better track of their internal documentation.
IT followed suite[1] some time after, and we now offer a wiki to any department that wishes to keep track of their documentation this way - some are using it; some aren't. I think one of the drivers has been that the other option has been sets of web pages, and people see wikis as a simpler option. Some of the other departments have been using other solutions, such as... um, I think one of the departments used doxygen? Within IT, we're strongly encouraged to have highly structured page names, and heirarchical page structures to help with navigation. And when things change, I know I do a full text search for relevant keywords to try and catch all references to the script or server name that I'm changing. I think that's one of the big wins for me, at least - I'm not having to switch contexts to update the documentation.
Comparing and contrasting my experience with using wikis for roleplaying game background - players tend to update pages much more than creating new ones. So maybe providing a skeleton of pages may help to encourage people to use a wiki? (Having plenty of content would probably help as well.)
I'm afraid that I'm not sure I can offer any insights into ways to encourage non-technical users to get into wikis. I suspect that the non-wysiwyg paradigm means that it's always going to be a bit of a tough sell to non-technical users. It would be interesting to see if making a bunch of macros to let Word users edit and save out the document would make it more acceptable? I wonder how difficult it would be...
Of course, the problem may not be with the interface, so much as with the difficulty of getting anyone to do any documentation at all. :) If there's a bunch of documentation already extant, converting it to a wiki (and having a good search function) may be sufficient to give it the boost it needs, since they're getting something useful out-of-the-box. If the way to search the documentation you have at the moment is sufficiently bad (and the conversion step is sufficiently easy), then this might be the push you need - it also depends on how much a win the people using the wiki see being to update the documentation on-the-fly is.
Anyway, I hope that there are some useful thoughts in there somewhere.
[1] Or is it "followed suit"? Googling, there are plenty of pages who use both forms in the same page, but none that give guidance as to usage. Bah.
Posted by svend at December 10, 2004 7:50 PMIt's "followed suit", from card games.
By the way, you get Movable Type error messages on previewing comments.
Posted by: Jamie at December 11, 2004 10:12 AM