Answering Tough Questions About Wikis -- Interview with Anne Gentle
Listen here:
In this podcast, Anne Gentle, author of The Quick Web for Technical Documentation, tackles some of the toughest questions about wikis, such as, How do you reuse and possibly single source your wiki content? If only 1 percent of your users contribute, is the wiki even worth it? How do you deal with the lack of a robust style editor in a wiki? What should you do when you do not like a user contribution?
Additional Resources
From Anne:
Here's a list of the sites I mentioned:
- Anne Gentle's blog: www.justwriteclick.com
- One Laptop Per Child
- WikiMatrix.org
- Dojo Offline Toolkit
- keycontent.org
- www.onemanwrites.co.uk
- Text interview: Dee Elling, a tech pubs manager at CodeGear, discusses wikis that she has maintained or managed. Interview about wikis for tech doc with Dee Elling of CodeGear
- Text interview: Emily Kaplan, a contract writer at Motorola, on the MotoQ wiki maintenance. Wikis for technical documentation, one writer's story
- Podcast interview: Harry Miller at Microsoft interviews Molly Bostic about the MSDN Wiki. MSDN Wiki - An Interview with Molly Bostic
- Anne's article in the Sep/Oct 2007 issue of Intercom: The Quick Web for Technical Documentation
- www.imiscommunity.com
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Tech Writer Voices features podcasts related to the field of technical communication. You can download and listen to these podcasts on the go, so that while driving to work or running on the gym treadmill, you can continue learning and expanding your knowledge of the rapidly changing, always interesting field of help authoring. Send any feedback to tomjoht@gmail.com.
About Tom Johnson
I'm an API technical writer based in the Seattle area. On this blog, I write about topics related to technical writing and communication — such as software documentation, API documentation, AI, information architecture, content strategy, writing processes, plain language, tech comm careers, and more. Check out my API documentation course if you're looking for more info about documenting APIs. Or see my posts on AI and AI course section for more on the latest in AI and tech comm.
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Thanks for the comment. Actually, the hard part was patching up the places where the connection went silent every once in a while. Did you notice that in several places I took out entire sentences? I had to listen to the podcast in its entirety to be sure I wasn't botching it. Then for some reason my voice is totally distorted in places. I don't know whether to attribute this to the Levelator or to Skype. Honestly, usually the connection is better and there's not much editing at all.
Tom, you had a great set of ten questions. I don't know if we got to them all but I thoroughly enjoyed talking with you. Your questions made me do my homework ahead of time and I appreciate that.
You wouldn't know that the connection completely dropped in the middle of our phone conversation, he's just that good at editing interviews to make them into really good podcasts. There's an art to the audio interview and Tom makes it sound easy but he's actually very skilled and talented, don't let him tell you otherwise. :)
Thanks Tom for the opportunity. Dian, I'd love to hear feedback on the podcast since your email to Tom inspired some of the questions.