Accelerated Authoring™ @ Method M

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.

Following the previous post on Wiki’s in documentation, and some off-line discussions, here is Reichman’s Rule for When Wikis Work for Technical Documentation:

1. Trust.  High degree of trust that people who edit the Wiki will not sabatoge or contribute nonsensical content (or worse).
2. Tolerance.  Many contributors and editors mean that the quality of the writing will not be perfect and will not be consistent.  Our take — don’t worry about it.
3. Critical mass.  If the number of contributors/editors will be very low, then a Wiki will not pick up the critical mass to attract users.
4. Incentives.  What incentives to developers, users and other staff have to contribute to the wiki?  If the answer is none, they won’t contribute.  Make sure to build-in incentives.
5. Confidence.  It takes a confident technical writer to “let go” and open up his or her documentation to Wiki. If you think that the best way to function in the workplace is keep your head in the sand and take no chances, then don’t do a Wiki.
6. Medium to low critical path.  If the cost of an error is very high, I’m not sure that Wikis are a good idea.  Of course, the error might be caught and corrected, but if we are covering nuclear power plant operation or brain surgery we don’t want to leave open this window of opportunity.

More to come on Reichman’s Rule for When Wikis Work for Technical Documentation – but looking forward to reader input here.

Katriel

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.”