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Posts Tagged ‘Intercom’
The “Quick Web” for Technical Documentation
I’m happy to report that my article about using wikis for technical documentation was published last week in the STC Intercom.
A PDF my article is available for anyone to download, STC member or STC non-members alike.
I’ll be giving a presentation about wikis for technical documentnation to the STC Austin community on Tuesday November 6th at the Commons Center, which is located at 10100 Burnet Road, Austin, TX 78758, near the southwest corner of Burnet Road and Braker Lane on the University of Texas J. J. Pickle Research Campus. Map
If you’d like to see what else I’ve written about wikis, take a look at the articles in my wiki category, or check out this list from my talk.bmc.com blog.
So many people helped me with the Intercom article. Kelly Holcomb is an excellent editor and helped me with it in her small amounts of spare time. Emily Kaplan read an early copy and also helped me sort through my notes. Michael Cote has sent me interesting items about wikis that he has found and also constantly tags useful information in del.icio.us. Diane Fleming was investigating wikis on her own, asked me about them, and then gave me great feedback on an early copy of the article. Tom Johnson was extremely positive when he first read it as well. I spoke with Dee Elling who had two excellent experiences to talk about in her interview with me. Harry Miller had a podcast interview with Molly Bostic, the PM on the MSDN wiki team, that was very informative.
It takes a community to write about online communities. Thanks, everyone!
Contributing to wikis as a technical writer
I’ve been researching an article for STC Intercom about wikis and technical documentation as discussed in my previous post. In about two years of my interest in the topic, I have only discovered a handful of examples of wikis used for end-user documentation for a technical product. And sometimes I even stretched the term “technical product” to include all of eBay. Heh.
If you’re also interested in wiki research, I have also been compiling bookmarks of blogs or websites that comment on wiki use on del.icio.us too at http://del.icio.us/annegentle/wiki.
Anyway, here’s a list of the ones I’ve found as good examples so far, but my criteria are loose and fast, such as recognizable products or geeky products. I’m sure there are more, and this list of the top 57 wikis based on popularity offers an even longer list.
- Apache wiki: http://wiki.apache.org/
- Adobe Labs: http://labs.adobe.com/wiki/index.php/Main_Page
- eBay: http://www.ebaywiki.com/
- Motorola Q: http://www.motoqwiki.com/
- MSDN: http://www.msdnwiki.com/
- Quadralay: http://wiki.webworks.com/FrontPage
- SplunkBase: http://www.splunk.com/base
But instead of soliciting more examples, I want to ask a few more questions myself. How many of these wikis would I use to get an answer to a question? Probably all of them. Now, how many wikis have I contributed to? How about you? If you haven’t ever contributed to a wiki, why not? If you have, tell us which one, and what motivated you to contribute?
Wiki for tech pubs - ready for main dish status? Or still undercooked or side dish material?
I’ve been doing some research for an article for the STC Intercom based on the interview I did with a friend of mine who does maintenance on the MOTO Q wiki. The article will come out this fall and I can’t wait to see if any rousing discussion appears on the STC forums. In the meantime, I want to continue to blog about wikis because I want to continue to research their use in the technical publications world.
I have had an interest in wikis for technical documentation for a couple of years now. There are a couple of good discussions on wikis for technical documentation from February 2007 on Tom Johnson’s I’d Rather Be Writing Blog as well as The Write Time blog. Tom’s post talks about using wikis to help with the documentation process. In response, there’s a wonderful entry by Lars Trieloff about exactly how a writer uses wikis for technical documentation.
While my STC Intercom article doesn’t talk about the internal wikis I’ve used for documentation tasks, as an Agile team member, I did find that the wiki housed information while development was ongoing and I also edited pages to keep them updated as I discovered something in the code that didn’t match the wiki.
It’s funny, in an early blog post I wrote on the internal blogs at BMC I said that I did not see how wikis would be used successfully for technical publications. I have since changed my once low opinion of wikis but I still see them supplementing other documentation, not substituting completely for technical documentation. I’d welcome discussion about wiki as standalone or supplemental end-user documentation. What do you think? Should the merits of wiki for certain products win out as the exact right documentation for that particular product especially one either related to an Agile methodology or social media? Or are wikis relegated to an upgrade to the customer support forum with a kludgey way of entering the information and no good method for outputting an information deliverable worth reading?
