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Posts Tagged ‘MSDN’
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?
Found a Microsoft tech writing blog
In addition to being an interesting view into tech pubs at Microsoft, the blogger talks to MSDN Wiki product managers. So I wanted to be sure to point to Harry Miller’s Technical Writing Blog. A few weeks ago he posted a podcast where he interviewed Molly Bostic, who is a PM on the MSDN Wiki which was recently released. Worth listening to, only about 15 minutes long. I have to admit I have a short audio attention span. I can read for hours but listening? Not so much.
She talks about the feedback they’ve received so far and even addresses one of my questions about protecting their wiki content from “graffiti” as I call it in this post, although she refers to unwanted wiki content as spam. As a team they are also addressing issues related to authority, such as, how can individual users get more “cred” on the site, and how can readers of the wiki find out which posts are the most valued. I also was interested to learn that due to the Creative Commons license they’ve selected, they cannot roll back the content into Microsoft’s online help or knowledge base.
How much markup is enough for a wiki?
The answer is, it depends
I noticed that the MSDN wiki for Visual Studio has just three markup tags for content edits. It appears you get basically three tags: heading, body, and code. Now, in their case, they have strictly defined what they intend for users to enter in their wiki, which is intended to contain mostly code snippets that support the reference documentation. I believe limiting the tag set helps when the intended content is narrowly defined.
At the opposite end of the spectrum, my thoughts on a DITA Wiki tool would allow for many many tags to be used, in fact, all the tags that DITA allows could be used in a DITA-based Wiki. Would this freedom to tag cause fewer people to contribute? Or would the contributions be all the richer and fuller due to the ability to write just what you need to for that particular topic? Let me know what you think.
