---
title: "Review of Alan Porter’s Wiki: Grow Your Own for Fun and Profit"
date: 2010-11-25
description: "$( document ).ready(function() { // Handler for .ready() called. $("
canonical_url: https://idratherbewriting.com/2010/11/25/review-of-alan-porters-wiki-grow-your-own-for-fun-and-profit/
---
# Review of Alan Porter’s Wiki: Grow Your Own for Fun and Profit
Alan Porter's *Wiki: Grow Your Own for Fun and Profit*, [published by XML Press](http://xmlpress.net/2010/10/13/wiki-grow-your-own-for-fun-and-profit/) in October 2010, provides an excellent introduction to wikis. This is a short, easy-to-read book spanning about 150 pages. Alan has a keen sense of organization and liveliness in his writing. He carries the gardening metaphor throughout the book, ending with five solid case studies and an extended response to common criticisms against wikis.

Sometimes discussions about wikis make it seem as if they're a new technology. But Alan explains that Ward Cunningham developed the first wiki in 1995 -- fifteen years ago! Despite the relative ease with which Alan responds to wiki concerns (about inaccuracies, lack of participation, disorganization, and so on), wikis still haven't gained traction as the predominant authoring platform.

One has to wonder, given the many advantages of wikis, why they haven't they taken off as *the *platform for web and help content? Especially in an age of collaborative authoring, distributed ownership, dynamic editing, and agile development, you'd think wikis would be the most common platform for help authoring in tech comm departments.

And yet, in the [2010 WritersUA Tools Survey](http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/tools_survey), wikis aren't even included as a tool (see the [survey's list of tools](https://s3.us-west-1.wasabisys.com/idbwmedia.com/images/2010/11/writersuatoolssurvey.png)). Almost every other help authoring, graphics, and video, and layout tool is mentioned, but wikis are absent. Either WritersUA accidentally omitted them (this year and every previous year), or they don't take wikis seriously, or wikis aren't considered help authoring tools.

My point is that wikis still have a long way to go toward mainstream adoption, despite their decade-and-a-half presence on the web. Alan's book is a welcome addition to the promotion of wikis and wiki culture.

Although Alan's audience seems more focused on new wiki users, he does dive into an issue that I struggle with: wiki round tripping. With round tripping, you publish from a source format to a wiki format, allow the wiki to be updated, and then write your updated wiki content back to your source format. For example, with WebWorks, Alan says the original documentation source is in Framemaker, which they publish to a wiki format using ePublisher. If they did round-tripping, after the wiki was updated, they would write the updated wiki content back to Framemaker.

However, WebWorks doesn't do round tripping. After users make edits to the WebWorks documentation, the WebWorks team manually updates the source Framemaker files with the changed content.