It's interesting you gave that example. Before my first use of a wiki I was on a team that used Lotus Notes and did project organization in a team folder. I loved that Notes would highlight which documents had been updated since the last time I read them.

In the next project, that team used a wiki. It's simpler. But, the fact it didn't tell me which documents had been updated effectively made it useless. People typed new project designs into the wiki but no one saw them since they couldn't, at a glance, know which of the hundreds of pages had been updated since they last read them.

It was too simple

Here's the page for my local makerspace's wiki, which runs on mediawiki:

https://bloominglabs.org/Special:RecentChanges?hidebots=1&li...

> It was too simple

That happens when you ignore requirements, either because they were outright discarded or because they were never recognized. "The simplest thing possible" is understood to include: "to meet all requirements."

http://www.extremeprogramming.org/rules/simple.html

It is possible the OP came to this conclusion without knowing about Ward Cunningham?

> Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.

And I found a similar quote from Aquinas

> If a thing can be done adequately by means of one, it is superfluous to do it by means of several; for we observe that nature does not employ two instruments where one suffices

(Aquinas, [BW], p. 129).

[0] https://blogs.oracle.com/javamagazine/post/interview-with-ke...

Sometimes better to not assume the worst of people by default. Very easy to not know where something comes from, misremember or come up with something in parallel.

At no time was anything like the "worst of people" anywhere on the radar.