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ISSUE: JUNE 2009 In This Issue: |
Wikis Are Good For You! By Cheryl Jasper, Technical Writing Consultant First introduced over 10 years ago, wikis have now become commonplace in many companies in Silicon Valley and beyond. A wiki is an interactive and collaborative webpage, which can be edited by anyone with a web browser. I’ve implemented a few wikis in my time, and I’m here to tell you about them in the hopes that you’ll be inspired to implement one too. In a publications environment, wikis can be invaluable. I recently completed a documentation project, and I built a wiki in order to share information about the manuals I was working on for my client. This particular wiki included pages for:
Writers, editors and others in the company were able to contribute and update the wiki pages easily. To update information, they simply clicked “Edit” and the page became a document; “Save” and the document became a webpage again. Any of us can add more pages as new information becomes available or new procedures are developed and all changes are noted on the page. Unfortunately, the wiki mentioned above is behind a firewall, so I can’t share it. I can show a larger, much more complex wiki that I implemented. It's a service business referral wiki for my neighborhood (http://mlna.wikispot.org). This wiki is truly a collaborative effort. I simply implemented its structure, added the first few categories to the home page, and let my neighbors have at it. Scores of people have contributed referrals (both good and bad) for service businesses they've used. My neighbors have come to depend on the information in this wiki when they want to hire a contractor or are looking for local information. Feel free to poke around, although you won't be able to contribute to it unless you live in my neighborhood. I first implemented the referral wiki using the Wikimedia technology (just like Wikipedia). That means you download the wiki files onto your web server and host it yourself. The good news about that is that you can implement it under your own domain (such as http://www.montaloma.org/wiki), and you have lots of customization options. The bad news is that it didn't provide enough security control to keep out spam (links to sites that steal information from your computer)... at least not that I could figure out. In the past year, that wiki was hit almost daily with spam, and the clean-up requirements were becoming overwhelming for me as a volunteer. So I recently implemented a new referral wiki with much tighter security controls using WikiSpot, and transferred all of the referrals from the old wiki to the new one. WikiSpot hosts the wiki for you, so you don't need a server, which is convenient for a lot of people who don't already have a web presence. The down side to this type of implementation is that some companies feel that their data isn't safe unless it's inside their firewall. So it all depends on the individual needs of the community using it. The WikiSpot technology is very easy to use but has fewer options. For me, it had everything I needed, and I was able to implement the wiki and bring over all of the data in about 6 hours. (Most of that time was actually spent bringing over the data in a way that didn't bring the spam with it.) The best news of all is that all of this wiki technology is completely free. Whether you download the software and implement it on your own server or you implement it on a hosted server, there's no cost to you or your company! So first, figure out the purpose of your wiki. Then decide who should be able to contribute to it and who should be able to read it. Your next decision is whether you want to host it yourself on your own web server or have it hosted by a wiki site. Then design the structure of the wiki and start implementing it. Don't be surprised if it doesn't really take shape until people start contributing information to it. That's fine! The nice thing about wikis is that you don't need to do a lot of up-front design work or content development. Because it's a collaborative effort, the wiki becomes whatever its community creates. So now you know a little more about wiki technology. Go forth and wiki! ______________________________________________ Cheryl Jasper is a consultant in the San Francisco bay area who provides technical writing, web site design and development, and quality system documentation services to high tech, med tech, and bio tech firms.
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