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

OK. So you made a document wiki. But how do you get subject matter experts to contribute? After all, in Wikipedia only a fraction of viewers ever contribute, but that fraction is still a very large critical mass (As of November 2006, Wikipedia receives 200,000 edits a day). This post was motivated by an off-line correspondence with Anne Gentle about motivation for contributors. Anne’s blog Exploring Information Design and Development has many useful and well-written posts about DITA, Wikis and other topics.

So How Does Your Document Wiki Reach a Critical Mass?

You probably don’t need anywhere need 200,000 edits a day – or even a year – for your Wiki to reach a critical mass that it will be interesting enough to attract and retain viewers. But you to need to attain a critical mass. If your users think that most of the reference and how-to information that they need is found in on-line help, your technical document Wiki project will fail.

Incentives, Incentives, Incentives

You could rely on the good will of your subject matter experts to contribute to the Wiki for the common good. Or, you could recall that 20^th century efforts to replace personal incentives with altruistic “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need” resulted in the deaths of tens of millions from repression and famine under Stalin and Mao.

In the academic world, recognition for contributing knowledge (typically measured by publications) comes in the form of tenure, increased research grants, and – of course – enchanced social status in the community.

A brief and readable academic study “Why Do People Write for Wikipedia? Incentives to Contribute to Open-Content Publishing” by Andrea Forte and Amy Bruckman of the Georgia Institute of Technology, describes what incentives work for Wikipedia and provides important lessons for any organization who wants to ensure the success of their own Wiki.

Bottom line: you need to provide incentives.

What Can You Do to Provide Incentives for your Company Wiki?

One approach is just to close down alternative venues. No more RoboHelp, Flare, or WebWorks conversions from Word or FrameMaker. This approach is likely to work for your technical writing staff who, after all, have to put their output somewhere. But, it is unlikely to work for subject matter experts (SMEs) – the engineering, implementation, support and management whose inputs we want and need to reach critical mass.

For SMEs, I suggest recognition. First and foremost recognition. In any organization, but especially in large organizations, ambitious staff need to keep their face in the public view to advance.

• Topic pages should identify contributors and editors.
• User pages should provide metrics for contributors (e.g., started X topics, contributed edits to Y topics, offered Z edits over the last year).
• Topic pages or user pages should offer contributors the possibility of including their picture, real name and/or contact information (e.g. Jane Doe, implementation mananger for new customers in Slovakia.)

Katriel

In response to “It takes a confident technical writer to ‘let go’ and open up his or her documentation to Wiki” in a previous post I have been berated for not mentioning that you can configure most Wikis to allow select users to add/edit content. 

So, for clarity:  

• You can configure most Wikis to allow select users to add/edit content. 
• For example, you might want to allow the tech writers, product managers and CTO write permission.
• For other users, the Wiki functions much like a regular on-line help (except, of course, you can enable users to add comments, view other comments, and you can exercise a lot of control over the look and feel of the Wiki.)

Katriel

Tom Johnson of Tech Writer Voices has setup a directory of technical writer blogs.  This is an excellent resource.

By the way, Tom has both Tech Writer Voices (a podcast for technical writers) and I’d Rather be Writing (a blog for technical writers, with lots of neat ideas and useful links).

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.”