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RE: using a wiki as your primary authoring tool & delivery mechanism
Subject:RE: using a wiki as your primary authoring tool & delivery mechanism From:"Gordon McLean" <Gordon -dot- McLean -at- GrahamTechnology -dot- com> To:"'TECHWR-L'" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com> Date:Mon, 7 Jan 2008 10:21:36 -0000
I think it's slightly different if you are using a Wiki to 'document' an
application.
Most people who are interested in contribuing will be happy to register, and
will probably not vandalise anything (registering also re-enforces the idea
of ownership of edits, you are accountable if you change something as
everyone can see who edited what).
The best piece of advice I've read is to just start it and see what happens.
Wikis can take a little nuturing to get going but if you have a good core
group of users, contributing and actively editing, then it'll soon be an
excellent resource.
Best of luck!
Gordon McLean
-----Original Message-----
From: techwr-l-bounces+gordon -dot- mclean=grahamtechnology -dot- com -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com
[mailto:techwr-l-bounces+gordon -dot- mclean=grahamtechnology -dot- com -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- c
om] On Behalf Of Sandy Harris
Sent: 07 January 2008 00:02
To: TECHWR-L
Subject: Re: using a wiki as your primary authoring tool & delivery
mechanism
> ... how
> best to make the wiki easily searchable (there's tons of information on
it).
Good search is built into the mediawiki software
> There are also questions about whether we even want to push people
> toward searching or whether we should be expecting them to use our
> very lengthy table of contents, and so on and so forth.
>
> I unfortunately have little experience with wikis. Does anyone else?
> As my comments above might indicate, I'm primarily interested in
> navigation, but any other guidelines or best practices for doing
> documentation on a wiki would be appreciated. We are using MediaWiki
software, if that helps.
There are going to be disagreements over content, perhaps sometimes
degenerating to "edit wars" where A changes the page one way, then B changes
it back, then A, ... Perhaps yours will not be as intense as some on
political or historical content, but they'll happen.
You need some policies to deal with those. Wikipedia talks about "neutral
point of view", Wikitravel "be fair", ... On every wiki I have seen, each
article has a talk page where such issues can be thrashed out.
Will you have vandals? Many wikis do; wikitravel's pages on USA, China,
Isreal and "Gay and lesbian travel" have all had utterly over-the-top rants
turn up. Then we had a clown moving dozens of pages to silly titles.
Should only registered users be allowed to edit in an effort to restrict
that?
--
Sandy Harris,
Nanjing, China
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