Reinvention

Is it good when a great new idea you come up with turns out to be old news? Of course it doesn't feel that great, but then if you were not pursuing some personal profit, all that matters is - the implementation has already been done for you. Not quite the way you wanted, not perfect, no, but it's there. And if we're talking open-source software, then it's there for the taking. The last few months I've been spending/wasting much of my cycles thinking about computer-aided collaboration. So, I thought, wikis are great when you want to make changes quickly, but they have limited functionality. Why not let wiki users edit the wiki itself so they can quickly improve it - and built on it then. It appears that's about what is called a structured wiki and a wiki application. And there are some successfull open implementations, TWiki for one. I'm going to study the subject for a while.