I had a conversation with a developer the other day about help material. He said that when he sees static pages, he assumes the content is out of date. He prefers forum threads because he can see the dates, and because forums contain real information from people using the product. He likes wikis because he Continue Reading »
Tag Archives: Wikis
Is Collaborative Authoring Over-Hyped?
If there’s one business buzzword that you hear all over the place, “collaboration” must rank in the top 10. When it comes to technical writing, if we open our arms to collaboration, giving a warm embrace to “collaborative authoring” is only one more little step. It feels so tolerant and embracing to be collaborative. It Continue Reading »
My Journey To and From Wikis: Why I Adopted Wikis, Why I Veered Away, and a New Model
PDF version This is a story about my journey to wikis and back again. The Need for Shared Ownership Several years ago, I worked in a department that produced products for senior leadership in our organization. I was the only technical writer, one of the first hired as a technical writer in fact. I used Continue Reading »
Upcoming STC Webinar: Creating Help in a Wiki Environment
I’m giving an STC webinar this Thursday titled “Creating Help in a Wiki Environment.” Here’s the description: Creating Help in a Wiki Environment Thursday, 7 June | 4:00–5:00 PM EDT (GMT-4) One advantage to working in a wiki environment is to enable collaboration among a community of users. Without this collaboration, wikis offer little more Continue Reading »
Confab 2012: Thoughts and Reactions
I recently attended Confab in Minneapolis. I was one of about 5 technical writers among the 650 attendees, which is why I found it surprising to hear Erin Kissane say, We can learn a lot from tech comm. Let me repeat that. We can learn a lot from tech comm. I felt pleased to hear this Continue Reading »
Differences between blogs and wikis, and why you might need both
At work I have often grumbled about the fact that we have both a blog and a wiki, and that content shared between them sometimes seems redundant and unnecessary. However, I have since come to realize how well blogs and wikis fit together. I think it makes sense to have both — at least in Continue Reading »
Guest Post: Why I Love Wikis
The following is a guest post by Neal Kaplan, a technical writer at Zuora, Inc. Another post about wikis? Why not! Wikis are great! Just to set the stage, I’ve been a technical writer for a while now, working for software companies in Silicon Valley. (In fact, I often forget that there are technical writers Continue Reading »
Subpage Titles on Wikis — Challenges, Conventions, and Compromises
One of the challenges with wikis (or at least with Mediawiki) is figuring out how to title pages that all belong to the same product or group. I spent a bit of time researching best practices with this and didn’t come up with a clear answer. I tried to also figure out why I’d never Continue Reading »
Guest Post: Wikis Are the Future of Technical Documentation
The following is a guest post by Mick Davidson, a technical writer with 20 years of professional writing experience. Before I get started I’d like to thank Tom for giving me this opportunity to bang on about why I think wikis are the future for technical documentation. Like many writers, up to a few years Continue Reading »
Why don’t technical writers use wikis — or do they?
The following is a guest post by Sarah Maddox, a technical writer at Atlassian. In a recent conversation, Tom mentioned that he’s been pondering this question: “Why, in a time when collaboration is more important than ever, do wikis still remain mostly unused as a help authoring tool in tech comm departments?” Tom asked me Continue Reading »