by Monica Winkelman, Member

From Wikipedia – A “wiki” is a collection of web pages designed to enable any authorized user to contribute or modify content.

I’ve used a wiki before, as I’m sure most people have, but only in a superficial way. I’ve searched for information in Wikipedia and read the user-generated content, but I’ve never before been interested in contributing to the information stream. Now, I look at wikis in a whole new way, and I really think they are the future of Web collaboration.

While at the annual STC Summit this year, I attended an exciting, enlightening presentation by Rahul Mehrotra on wikis. Rahul presented a case study from his own company about how his 10-person documentation team converted thousands of pages of user guides, WebHelp files, HTML Help files, and a company knowledge base into a wiki.

Due to increases in development production, Rahul and his team had become responsible for updating and publishing 30,000+ pages of documentation multiple times a year. To manage this monster, the documentation team decided they needed not only new tools but an entirely new process, a process that allowed for genuine collaboration. To achieve this end, they started looking at wikis.

After researching several wikis, they decided on Confluence, a commercial wiki engine. This wiki served their particular technical needs enabling them to generate PDF books, WebHelp files, and HTML Help files all from the same wiki articles. Now, anyone in the company can update product information without having to learn complex products like FrameMaker and WebWorks Professional. Developers can input new product information into the wiki, and the documentation team can spend its time refining the developer information and improving the documentation’s usability. They can actually focus on making the help “helpful,” rather than just accurate. And the documentation is never more than one day out of date, since changes are published nightly in an automatic build.

All the technical writers in the room were stunned after Rahul told us this incredible story. Developers voluntarily giving up information? Technical writers given enough time to complete and polish their documentation? An entire company of users generating information that stays current?

After I returned home, I was excited about using a wiki for documentation, a company knowledge base, or both, but I had no idea how to bring it up. Then, at our weekly team meeting, my director asked me to talk a little about my experiences at the Summit. I started talking about the wiki presentation, and people actually got interested in the topic. They asked me questions about wikis and about what they can do. A couple of people even brought up needs they felt could be met by a wiki.

I immediately asked my director if I could start researching wikis for us to use. She agreed and said another department had just started looking at developing a wiki knowledge base. After researching wikis a little bit, I decided not to pursue converting my documentation to a wiki just yet. I think initially we’ll benefit the most from having a company knowledge base. I’ve teamed up with the other department representative to find the best (free) wiki for our all our company’s needs.

So far our best contender is Deki Wiki. We’re a Microsoft shop, and this is one of the best open source wiki engines we could find that’s compatible with .NET. It has flexible customization and the WYSIWYG editor is great; it’s just what we need to get our non-techie employees interested.

Right now, I’m excited that at least a little part of Rahul’s vision is going to make it into our company. Hopefully, we’ll be developing a truly collaborative, living knowledge base that’s easy to access and easy to update. Wish us good luck as we take our first steps toward the future of Web collaboration.