Accelerated Authoring™ @ Method M

Four Flavor Falafel has opened here in Jerusalem, not too far from Method M. Get your falafel spiced to your taste. Cardamon, curry, chili and – ugh – cinnamon flavors. No longer is the falafel maker master of what goes into your pita. And you know what, he looks pretty happy about it. No wonder, he charges more than his competitors.

User manuals, reference guides and the rest of the technical documentation business has been run much like traditional falafel makers manage their stands. Tech writers create and control all content. This top-down paradigm has made us masters of our manuals, but maybe it bears review in light of the success of Four Flavor Falafel and so many “Web 2.0” businesses.

Wikis for technical documentation are one way of inverting the content pyramid. Opening up contributions and editing may make a lot of sense if your product has an active user community. You can harness the power of a wide group to create more content that users want. Do you lose control? To some extent. But remember the falafel maker who opened up his top-down hierarchy and improved his bottom line.
Katriel

Once way to look at Wikis is as a replacement for traditional documentation released in sync with versions.  This may make sense quite often. 

Another way to look at Wikis is as a way to do collaborative documentation.

Following a line of reasoning suggested by David Weinberger, in many cases it makes sense for tech writers to post drafts of the docs they’re working on themselves (non-collaboratively), using the Wiki infrastructure to open up the drafting process — getting comments/additions/changes from whoever edits the Wiki oontent.  In this scenario, the tech writer still “owns” the content, but leverages the collective wisdom/inputs of a larger community to improve his or her deliverables.