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Helen asks:In response to what's below, could you explain how "social media writing"
qualifies as technical communications?
In fact, my company faces quite precisely the issue of "technical writing" in a social site. The community exists to share technical details around the use of our product. There's a life cycle for this writing/information, and there's some threshold across which it becomes "curated technical writing". I see something like this:* Discovery -- Customers discover and write up usage or issues we couldn't predict* Dependency -- Discovery topics reveal dependencies among each other* Generalization -- Dependent topics reveal a pattern that can be generalized* Curation -- Generalized articles pass through review and are marked as official
There are lots of issues with technical content on a social site. Versioning, deprecation, accuracy, validation... At what point can you log a bug against social content? Should you ever log bugs, or will reputation take care of that (my thinking is that reputation is inadequate... Tyranny of the majority... Everybody might think something is correct when it's actually quite wrong.)
At some point, true technical writing has to intervene if you want to rely fully on the content. This is my idea of how social media writing can qualify as technical communication.
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