During lunch I ran across an interesting article from CNN Money about Wikipedia and Wikia (a for-profit offshoot).
This got me thinking, could we harness the power of wikis to help us generate and improve documentation for our software? Perhaps we could reformat Joe’s user guide into a wiki format and then anyone within the company or outside the company can improve the documentation with tips, tricks, etc.
Apache has a wiki that has some documentation on it, so that can give us an example of how well (or not well) a public documentation wiki works:
- Tomcat wiki
- Log4J wiki (very popular project)
- Apache wiki (contains Log4J, Tomcat and more)
It looks like there’s some information in the wikis, but nothing very interesting. Taking Tomcat as an example, you’ll see that their “real” documentation isn’t on the wiki at all. I think they may have had better luck if they had moved this content to the wiki. Only Tomcat developers can modify the “real” documentation at tomcat.apache.org, whereas Tomcat users (a much larger # of people) could modify the wiki content at wiki.apache.org.
So let’s take this out of the hypothetical and make it concrete: Joe, how difficult would it be to transfer the contents of the user guide into a wiki format? Spider software users: would the wiki format be easier or harder for you to use than the current Word document format? Also, do you think there might be someone in your organization that has particular expertise with Spider software that would like to contribute to something like this?
I like where you are going with this. One of the reasons we started with help forums instead of a help “desk” was because we knew that users keep having the same issues over and over. By having forums for users to post their questions and receive their answers via email and as a thread in the forum post, we could create a searchable FAQ database that would even include Seldom Asked Questions. This would be a nice addition, because our user community could point out where the documentation isn’t clear as well as enhance it themselves.
I agree. This idea is definitely worth a try. The worst thing that could happen is that it doesn’t work out and we trash the idea. Certainly no harm in trying. One of the things that has made Spider Strategies so successful is our willingness to try new ideas and make them work and if this makes it easier for the customer to use our software, then I am all for it. I will start working on this project immediately.
This would be a great topic for a wiki, and transferring your current content to wiki format is a good way to get the wiki started. If you’d like to have this hosted at Wikia (for free), let me know and I can create a new wiki for you.
Matt/Joe: do we want to host this at Wikia and have Angela set it up or do we want to host it? We need to get this started.
On Wikia’s homepage, they are featuring the Marvel Database wiki:
http://marveldatabase.wikia.com/Main_Page
Note the ads on the right. I like the idea of us putting up a public wiki, but I don’t think it would be very professional if our wiki had ads down the right hand side. It would probably be better for us to host a wiki ourselves or find someone we can pay to host it ad-free.