Wiki - Radical New Documentation Concept

Warren Togami warren at togami.com
Wed Sep 26 02:43:45 PDT 2001


http://www.kuro5hin.org/?op=displaystory;sid=2001/9/24/43858/2479

Article about the Wikipedia, a collaborative effort on the Internet to
create an encyclopedia made entirely by volunteer writers and editors.

This is a success story of the the radical new concept of a Wiki
documentation collaboration tool.  Under the Wiki community model, you have
many web pages that are fully open to editing by any site visitor.  This
system is open to abuse, but it is even easier to fix because all prior
versions of all pages are saved and archived.  Two or three clicks and the
page is fixed.

This "self healing" concept makes a system like this work, while allowing
the convenience and speed of a community built documentation project.
Editing HTML and uploading files is time consuming enough.  Try coordinating
that with hundreds of other people, and it takes a much larger organization
and maintenance effort.  Wiki nearly completely removes this overhead and
allows communities to write documentation together, rapidly and effectively.

There are thousands of these Wiki's across the web for many organizations,
and many schools and businesses are using them for internal documents with
great success.  We use Wiki for MPLUG documentation.  Documents have been
written by several local folks and people across the country when they saw a
need for such a document.  I'd say that it has been a success for us.
http://www.mplug.org/phpwiki/

Of course this paradigm doesn't work for all jobs, but keep this in mind as
an option for your own organization.

Warren Togami
warren at togami.com
Mid-Pacific Linux User's Group
http://www.mplug.org



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