Wikis for technical documentation?
Wikis are great. So, when and if will using a Wiki for documentation makes more sense than having tech writers create documents with an old fashioned publishing hierarchy (the TW owns the documents, proofreads all the documents, and releases in a publishing cycle)?
My good friend and colleague Yitzchak Gale suggests that in commercial software development environments the incentives for keeping up a Wiki generally aren’t available:
“In a typical commercial software developent environment, I have found that it is difficult to get a good documentation wiki going. People are focused on getting done what they are required to do, so they do not devote enough mind share to the wiki to make it work…. In contrast, almost every free software project uses a wiki of some kind as part of its documentation, and some rely entirely on a wiki. In free software, the measure of success is how much you can convince other people that what you are doing is important and interesting, and get them to join in.”
