Thoughts on wiki based documentation
- Low barrier to documentation reduces risk of obsolescence
- Cross referencing links improves usability and reduces duplication (i.e. inline wiki content is superior to attachments)
- Effective search and lightweight tagging works better than elaborate structure
- Audit trail and ability to rollback via version history reduces the need for elaborate access control
- A good way to keep documentation up to date is to make it easy to update it in small chunks while at work. (e.g. being able to email additions to a page)
- Content subscriptions and notifications are effective ways of keeping interested parties informed.
- Regular cleanup helps to keep it from turning into a hairball.
4 comments:
I have been an avid user of Wiki. However, I think that Wiki based documentation fall way short on printing. Though I am not much for printing unnecessary hard copies, however, nothing beats old fashioned paper when you are taking a train ride home.
I found dokuwiki a really nice and simple to use wiki engine, especially for documentation... and unlike mediawiki, this does not use a mysql db but stores data in text files....
We have just started doing this at work using the the wiki that comes as part of SharePoint. The issue is that in some cases people really want word docs or PDFs. The best solution I think is a way to structure the content in the wiki and at some point extract it to document form
We are using a wiki based management for more than 6 months. It has reduced the communication loads.
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