Products · Broad category
Wikis
Raised as a usability problem by 21 people on Hacker News over 17 years (2009–2025), in 20 threads.
This is a broad category rather than one product, so its issues aren't ranked on the home page.
No issue was raised by at least 3 people in 3 threads this year.
No issue was raised by at least 3 people in 3 threads in the last 5 years.
Every issue, all time, most people first
Editing tables, images and text on wiki pages is painfulUnreviewed
20092026- Wiki docs are disorganized, slow to load, and use obtuse markup, so people avoid editing them2020-08-10
- Plain wikis make it hard to find content without a tree view2020-07-13
- Wiki pages hide information and waste space, hurting browsing and idea linking2019-07-18
Unreviewed issues were grouped by machine: Claude Haiku labelled each comment as a usability complaint, named what it's about and summed up the problem in a line, and a small model grouped similar problems. Nobody has checked them by hand. Expect mistakes.
The newest 22 complaints
- Large video ads cover most of the page and slow the initial render before they can be closed2025-11-25
- Couldn't figure out how to view the hidden image on the page2025-01-10
- Editing takes many steps and page reloads, so the reader loses their place2022-04-20
- Wiki docs are disorganized, slow to load, and use obtuse markup, so people avoid editing them2020-08-10
- Plain wikis make it hard to find content without a tree view2020-07-13
- Hard to find the right page and make edits; login and navigation needed for each change2020-03-24
- Wiki pages hide information and waste space, hurting browsing and idea linking2019-07-18
- Wiki web interfaces are slow and awkward on mobile, and attaching media is painful2019-04-03
- Editing requires many page reloads and repeated searching between read, edit and preview modes2018-12-13
- Adding knowledge needs many reloads, scrolling and re-reading due to separate read and edit modes2018-02-19
- Outdated wiki pages mislead readers who cannot tell they are irrelevant2017-08-09
- Wiki pages are ugly and painful to manage tables, images and text2017-02-24
- Can't find where to start in a wiki; must guess titles or click randomly2016-06-06
- Search returns nothing and Recent Changes shows an empty page, so it seems broken2015-03-02
- Can't find the right wiki page, and no clear rules for where new pages or fixes go2013-06-12
- Can't figure out how to create pages or turn them into root pages2013-03-12
- Rich text input boxes rebind emacs keys, disrupting the user's editing2012-08-10
- Wikis create orphan pages and get messy and hard to navigate past about five pages2010-09-15
- Nobody can use the template system to replicate formatting across pages2010-09-02
- Non-technical people find wiki markup symbols foreign when editing text2009-01-27
- Wikis require users to actively search for topics, unlike emails that are pushed to them2009-01-27
- Users must decide where content belongs and read existing pages before posting, which feels too hard2009-01-27