Wednesday, November 25, 2009
An ongoing series to cover the many ways wikis can help collect and organize information for your business, team or community group.
As an English major who concentrated in professional writing and technical communication, documentation and authoring tools have always been close to my heart. One of the primary uses that has drawn me to wikis is their ability to provide a collaborative authoring, publishing and reader review system that is incredibly simple and eminently affordable.
EditMe's extensive documentation and support site has used the wiki model from day one and has proven that the model works. Customers have contributed documentation, they've commented on errors and omissions, and multiple authors can work on the documentation simultaneously without getting in each others' way.
During development of documentation, multiple authors often need to work together on content. Doing this with desktop software causes all the usual file sharing issues: read only files, overwriting changes, accidental deletions, and no automated way for team members to know when content has been changed. Using a wiki allows the process to happen seamlessly. Authors can work on the different topics at the same time, or even the same topic, relying on the wiki's ability to merge changes instead of locking pages or raising a conflict. Authors can easily be notified when content has been updated without having to email back and forth.
Technical authors frequently require input from engineers but understandably don't want to invite developers into their desktop software-based documentation. Many engineers feel at home in a wiki and are happy to provide their input and feedback there. Doing this streamlines the traditional meeting, note taking, authoring, review and edit cycle. Engineers feel like they're more involved, and authors can easily discern, edit and integrate engineer-contributed information.
Rather than authoring content in one tool and then having to publish to a web site, the wiki is the web site. Remember, wikis don't necessarily mean your content is openly editable to the world. Limit access to your authors, if you wish (probably a good idea, actually). But your customers will love the ability to always have the most current and accurate documentation available.
Taken a step further, giving your top tier and highly-involved customers the ability to contribute to product documentation will make them feel valued and appreciated, even if they don't contribute. Providing customers with some kind of feedback mechanism for documentation is the best way to ensure accuracy and completeness. You can allow commenting on all or individual pages without opening up editing. But allowing hand-picked customers to contribute directly can be very rewarding for both parties. Remember, you'll be notified when content is updated and you are free (and encouraged) to go in an edit for tone and quality.
For a financial perspective, a single license of FrameMaker would provide an EditMe wiki with unlimited users for more than four years. That's all I'm going to say about that.
If you haven't yet, give wikis a try for documentation. No authoring and publishing platform is perfect, but for value, simplicity and customer engagement, a wiki can't be beat.
