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Posts Tagged ‘wikislice’
Wiki as online help source
A response to the question, Wiki-to-Help? on the Help Authoring Tool Yahoo Group.
One of our test engineers (and the lead developer of our company wiki) just approached me with the idea of using our company’s internal wiki as the central repository for all company material and using it to generate online help.
I’m following the discussion with interest. I, too, had a similar question asked of me from a developer when we were working in an Agile development environment at BMC Software. In that case, which was at least three years ago, the matchup between the wiki HTML output and the HTML output I needed for our particular help system just wasn’t a good fit. But today, there are better pairings, input to output. I think it’s feasible to go from a wiki to an online help system. It really depends on what output you need, and what you’re willing to do to ensure that the wiki source is worthy of publishing (tested, vetted, trusted, and so on).
I’ve been working on wikis as source for manuals, where the output is a PDF file. In general, yes, wikis are a little clumsy to work in for authoring. For example, some wikitext doesn’t understand that you want a numbered step list with images in between each step and that you want the numbering to continue after each image. So if you’re accustomed to a nice HTML authoring interface, a wiki authoring interface will “feel” like a step about 10 years back in time. 
On the more interesting issue, the cultural issue (or the career issue, depending on how you think about it), I think the basis of most arguments against using wikis as source is the fear of loss of authoring control. See wikipatterns.com for the many anti-people patterns that wikis tend to foster if you don’t take steps to avoid them. I especially liked one of the responder’s comments to the list that he didn’t want to become an editor for a wiki. I think he’s right - that “magazine editor” is one of the roles you could take as a wiki-based author. You could also consider your role to be “community director” if you think you can motivate others to contribute to your wiki that will eventually be the help system. There are different roles that will evolve, and it’s up to you to figure out what role might work well in your environment (or if it would work at all). I wrote up a blog post last week about determining where your role as technical writer is most valued in the company, and building from that role.
I believe the cultural or social difficulties are the more difficult hurdle - you have to ensure that the community surrounding a wiki (those that can and will edit) is a group that is willing to work together and collaborate towards the common goal of publishing a customer-facing help system from the wiki. In a SXSW Interactive session titled “Edit Me! How Gamers are Adopting the Wiki Way” one panelist said that a core group of five editors on a wiki may be the best practice for the size of the group. This type of small number is represented and described in the 90-9-1 theory on wikipatterns.
A solution that might help you wrap your arms around the wiki as source is to set aside only one area or category of the wiki as the articles from which the online help gets generated. Again, without knowing the wiki engine you’re working with and the types of output you’d require, it’s difficult to know if a “wikislice” solution could help in your situation.
Anyway, I could go on and on (and I believe I just did go on and on) about using wikis as source for end-user documentation. I’m pleased that Sarah O’Keefe has just published a white paper titled “Friend or Foe? Web 2.0 in Technical Communication” that should be helpful as we begin to define our roles in each company and how we integrate user-generated content with our own on our product’s web sites.
I hope this information can help you build an argument for or against the use of wikis as source for online help. Please let me know the eventual outcome, and I’d love to hear your thoughts on my response.
What are wikislices? How can I try wikislicing?
I’ve had a very serendipitous journey lately based on my podcast on TechWriterVoices and the work on the One Laptop Per Child project that I want to share. Through others listening to the podcast, hearing about OLPC, and contacting me via my blog, I learned about wikislices, and it just might be a method for DITA and wiki to play in the same sandbox.
This concept seems very apropos to the shift we’re seeing in technical publications away from books. What’s interesting is that there seems to be two directions you can go from books - wikis or DITA, crowdsourcing or singlesourcing. Some times it seems like choosing between wikis and DITA is like new school/kewl kidz versus old school/squares.
But what if there’s a way to have your wiki be the single source (also crowd sourced but with a strong guiding hand, let’s say), but to create cross-sections or wikislices of that content? This idea would essentially allow writers to write in the wiki and then either the writer or an architect would “slice” it.
There is a way to Wikislice Wikipedia already. Go to wikislice.webaroo.com and enter a subject. You can view this nice slideshow showing the basic features of a wikislice. You can even make offline wikislices available.
There are selected wikislices created already for the One Laptop Per Child project, such as the Great Wall of China, Space exploration, and the Brothers Grimm.
What’s interesting to note is that the Webaroo wikislice of “violin” is different from the one for the OLPC wikislice of “violin” and it appears that the OLPC one is more easily read by a student. Somehow the slices are customized, perhaps for the audience? I’d like to dig deeper into the guts of a wikislice. All I’ve found so far is that they’re built using regular expressions according to the Wikislices definition on the OLPC Wiki.
With the correct use of tagging in your wiki, I would imagine that you could slice the wiki based on audience, language, or content type, such as grouping tasks, reference, or concepts.
It seems like any wiki could be wikisliced, and if DITA maps are the method for the slicing, then you can get a table of contents and PDF output based on a cross-section of your wiki - a wikislice. This process is just a thought piece right now, but my hope is that working on the OLPC project helps perfect the wikislicing process so that it could be used for other end-user documentation projects.
