It’s interesting with the OLPC wiki is used not only for figuring out how to use, program, and troubleshoot the XO laptop, but also collaboration project pages for meeting agendas, minutes, that sort of thing. So it serves multiple “crowds” and it shows. They’ve recently been indicating the audience members though – For the public and For developer banners appear on the pages based on the multiple templates applied for each section, I believe.

Another observation that I’ve read about on WikiPatterns is that there’s an anti-people pattern called “OverOrganizer” where one person rearranges to suit their view put – but it may ultimately cause others to lose interest in the wiki. It’s as if consensus wins over organization – check out Stewart Mader’s take on this pattern at wikipatterns.com/OverOrganizer. I’ll bring this seeming conflict up at our wiki and structured authoring talk at DocTrain West this week. Stewart apparently thinks a page maintainer pattern is a better method but I’ll try to learn more on what that entails – perhaps it is the subject matter expert who can bring these expert queries together for consumption by other wiki readers.

David Farning’s outline is interesting. I thought it was comparable in the small to classification systems like the Dewey Decimal System. Too small even for OLPC Wiki, perhaps. But isn’t it a great design pattern that a user might want to use as a search organizer for some problem domain they might want to be returned as a cohesive response? Such as “How to troubleshoot intermittent scratchy sounds in my car audio system” or “How to install all the related software of DITA Open Toolkit using latest components? Successfully on the first try?”

This might be what you mean by templates. At the topic level, templates can smooth out the user experience of reading sites like WikiHow. But at the Wiki level, organizing templates like Farning’s can bring meaningful sense to subsets of that content (wrap your arms around only the part you need/want to know, as it were).

Obviously, I’ll draw the parallel between knowledge hierarchies and DITA maps, which can represent structured sequence on sets of topics. Imagine Google search returning a logically grouped and sequenced set of links rather than a relevance-weighted sequence of possible hits… that is what expert-informed queries melded with organizing design patterns *could* bring to a wiki, newsgroup, blog, email folder, call center log file, or document CMS. Where wouldn’t it be useful?