I’d Rather Be Writing - Tom Johnson

[...] by Nacho Vega on May 6th, 2007 Here you have a fast lesson on how to get your own wiki set and [...]

[...] My two-minute demo on installing Dokuwiki [...]

[...]  Is Customer-Assessible Wikis for End-User Documentation a Contradiction? While the effort to provide more interactivity and power to the end-user seems to suggest that we open up a wiki to allow them to add and edit content, the basic idea of a set of edited documentation is now challeged with a social network of participating customers, all of whom may now edit, add, and delete content. How social can you go? This article is an attempt to look at the process of evaluating the use of a wiki for end-user documentation, if such a thing can exist. Are the two types of customer content — wikis and end-user documentation — mutually exclusive? Contents Questions Tools Background List of Wiki Sites Return to the list of Key Articles. Questions The first step is to determine why you want to wiki and where you want to go with it. Do you want to allow users to participate, to contribute, to edit: it’s a social media so it’s different qualitatively Notice we said users with an "s" not a single user; so it’s different quantitatively too. How to handle authentication of users (or do you)? legitimate users? how open, how social? What about content quality and and reliability of answers? so it’s different in terms of quality how to handle disputed material? how to maintain content quality? full time editor? How to integrate it with the rest of the content (docs, FAQ, forums, knowledge base, etc.) How to allow users to add anything and everything (personal comments?) have a reserved un-editable section? What about multiple languages? How to deploy it and secure it and maintain it? Will this be the “primary facility to conduct work”, to conduct interaction with your customers? Will you host it along with the rest of your Web-based content or will you outsource it and let an independent group host it? - just as a Dummies book is published independently. How do you handle copyright and legal concerns? Who owns the content? What about liability? How do you implement good search and index? Will customer input be tagged; will they have to enter keywords and select the type of content they are adding? How do you distinguish types of data? (bug, new feature request, undocumented feature, customer-specific info) How do you deal with mandated styles in a product name? How do you support different types of media? - wiki is mostly text based, but allows pictures, but what about videos, screen-casts, Flash, etc.? what about reviews and feedback and comments on added content? Tools (Virtual) Community Oriented Tools Blogs Collaborative Documents Email Lists Forums RSS Feeds Wikis Complete Virtual Communities http://www.jeteye.com http://www.drupal.org Background The article by Ryan Singel, that originally appeared on wired.com, Veni, Vidi, Wiki starts the topic. The enterprise wikis TWiki and Jot move beyond the traditional whiteboard sharing mode of a wiki by providing a platform where users can create simple, embedded applications within the wiki itself. These applications support basic business processes within a workplace; employees can track issues and call center status, manage tasks and reserve resources. Wikis with the best technical features can still fail if the organization does not fully embrace their use. However, unlike open consumer wikis, in business they are likely to be used in the conduct of work, on specific projects, by people whose own interests are aligned with that of business. This is especially the case if, after the initial grassroots movement, management fully supports the wiki not as an optional, after-the-fact knowledge-sharing tool, but the primary facility to conduct work, … Hear the discussion on TechWriter Voices: Wikis Are Coming: An In-Depth Exploration of Using Wikis in Documentation an interview with Katriel Reichman (in Israel). List of Wiki Sites This is a list of sites that use PmWiki for customer documentation: http://www.pmwiki.org/wiki?n=PmWiki.PmWikiUsers This is a list at FreshMeat.net: freshmeat.net/projects/cowiki Microsoft is letting users add comments to the docs (but not edit the existing docs) – what’s the site? Microsoft Channel9 hosts a number of wikis, and lists other Microsoft wikis sponsored by other groups. The page notes that the wiki search is broken, and provides a link to "temporary wiki search. One Microsoft wiki is the Channel9 Security wiki at channel9.msdn.com/wiki/default.aspx/SecurityWiki.HomePage. You have to be a registered Channel9 user to edit the page. http://www.wikipedia.org http://www.wikispaces.com ditacms.wikispaces.com Eweek had an article about wikis in the corporate world, which mentions Motorola as having numerous (over 3000) active (and apparently very useful) internal wikis, self-policed by the employees. http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,2061135,00.asp Tom Johnson of TechWriter Voices made a short video on installing DocuWiki: http://www.idratherbewriting.com/2007/05/06/installing-dokuwiki [...]

process that made it too complicated. Or maybe it was the lack of security. I just ran across dokuwiki, an implementation of a wiki that uses text files rather than a database. Installation is very easy, as is shown in the 2 minute video foundhere. I also saw a very good departmental website that is based on a wiki. That got me thinking. What if we had much of the Botany Department web site built using a wiki? Would it solve any problems? Would the look and feel work?

[...] they had released an updated version. The installation is much more streamlined, as demonstrated by Tom’s post, and we have implemented the latest version within our environment and are using it to produce the [...]

[...] with shell access to your server and other geeky stuff. In reality, it’s about as easy to install as Dokuwiki — assuming you have a typical hosted account, such as with Blue Host or Lunar Pages. [...]

[...] Other Wiki Resources Tom Johnson of TechWriter Voices made a short video on installing DocuWiki: http://www.idratherbewriting.com/2007/05/06/installing-dokuwiki ditacms.wikispaces.com 15 Productive Uses for a Wiki Retrieved from [...]