Slack != Wiki

I reflect on my experience learning a new collaboration application. Today I learned to compose a post, not just chat. Now I ask, can I reuse my words here? Do I want to? post

Slack isn't wiki, but what is it then?

Slack is everything one would expect of collaborative software. Making something like slack is a lot of work. Just working out the schema would be fraught with error opportunities. But for corporations sick of SharePoint it must be a breath of fresh air.

Federated Wiki is nothing that anyone would expect of collaborative software. It "knows" next to nothing which leaves mechanism in the hands of its users.

Of the mechanisms here on Slack I am most impressed with their incremental help. I've yet to turn it off. This might be due to inspired editing by technical writers. Or it could be some A.I. deciding what I need to know next. The help is the one thing I'd like to reverse engineer.

Then I wonder, could wiki ever offer the same help? How would it be written when so much of wiki's mechanism floats above it as 'workflows'? What would trigger wiki help? What would it point at? What is there to explain?

I was once asked, does wiki have to be so ugly? Now I ask, does wiki have to be hard to learn? Maybe so.