Wiki as a documentation delivery system? (take II)

[Geoff Hart <ghart -at- videotron -dot- ca>]

Responding to my suggestion of the need for strong access and 
modification control, Matt Horn noted: <<If you make it difficult to 
add or collaborate, then it isn't a wiki. I would guess there's an 
inverse relationship between the difficulty of adding content and the 
amount of content added.>>

This is true, but you're forgetting the context of the original 
message: this is not a tool for collaboration within a company, but 
rather a way to obtain input from users of the company's products. 
That's a great idea in terms of creating a dialogue with your product's 
users and producing documentation that meets their needs. It also lets 
you add content you wouldn't have thought to create on your own. So 
far, so good.

However, if you let any joker modify the content, then you get the same 
problem you get with Wikipedia: people with an agenda or who don't 
really know what they're talking about can modify the content. If they 
do a bad enough job, your company's reputation will suffer, and if 
someone gets hurt or suffers financial or other damage as a result of 
following bad advice, your company will be legally liable because the 
wiki ostensibly represents your company's advice.

Unlike the Wikipedia, you can bet that people won't be accessing the 
wiki regularly (nobody reads docs for pleasure), and that means errors 
may endure for quite a long time before someone catches them. That's 
particularly true if the errors are subtle, which many of them will be. 
And if you think it's hard to get technical reviewers to do their 
reviews with documentation that you control and that they only have to 
review once (see the current thread on this topic), do you imagine 
they'll be happy to add a daily check of the wiki to their list of 
responsibilities? Not bloody likely.

So to reiterate: The concept is a good one, but there are some 
significant pitfalls you have to overcome if you want to keep the wiki 
quality high and protect your employer.

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Geoff Hart   ghart -at- videotron -dot- ca
(try geoffhart -at- mac -dot- com if you don't get a reply)
www.geoff-hart.com
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