Quick, Free and Ready-to-Use: The Wiki Concept
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Speed and cost have always been, and are increasingly, key factors in documentation. Conventional processes and tools are often not flexible enough. This applies to commonly used professional authoring tools and, even more so, to information management systems as a growing necessity in documentation projects. High licence fees, typically combined with even higher costs for configuration, training, and workflow restructuring, make management systems difficult to work with, expensive, and inefficient. Moreover, due to the largely unstructured nature of available content, extensive testing is needed, often reducing company productivity over years or even stopping productive work altogether.
With these factors in mind, its time to look for alternatives, and there is one called wikis. Whereas the structure of content in "real" management environments (file system or database-supported system) must be defined in advance, a wiki entirely adapts itself to meet content requirements. No long-term planning just start developing creative knowledge bases right away.
What Is a Wiki?
The term wiki is based on the Hawaiian word, meaning "quick". This sums up the essence of wikis, which are designed for quick knowledge exchange. Any authorised user can read, search, edit, and link the contents of a wiki. The main management functions are available at no cost. The wiki concept was invented by Ward Cunningham and first used in 1994 to facilitate the flow of communication between developers. Today, there are many types of wikis used for different purposes.
Technically speaking, a wiki is a type of server software that allows users to edit, search for, and view contents in a basic Web browser.
What Do Wikis Offer?
The features described in the following sections belong to the standard scope of most wikis systems.
Because the source code is open, any number of functions can be additionally programmed.
Knowledge Resources
The key features of wikis are that users can edit content directly on a wiki page and easily link pages.
Internal Linking Using WikiWords
When users edit the content of a page, they can use WikiWords in the text. This has the following effect:
- If a particular WikiWord has not been used in this wiki before, a link to a new page with the WikiWord as the page name is created on the edited page. The user can then click the link, in this way, create a new page, and define the content.
- If the WikiWord has been used in this wiki before and a page with this name exists, a link to the page is created on the edited page.
Figure: Wiki page with links to other pages
External Linking
You can create links to other Web sites or files, such as spreadsheet files, by providing the corresponding destination address, in the same way that you create HTML links.
WikiWiki Markup Language for Formatting
The tags used by the WikiWiki markup language are very simple and are rendered into a HTML-based page by the server when a page is sent to a Web browser. Although the WikiWiki markup language is not standardised, all wikis have common tags for lists, headings, and the markup of WikiWords, without which linking of wiki pages would not be possible. These basic formats can be used to create and edit simple layout, quickly and easily.
Figure: Integrated editor
Embedding Images
Images can be referenced on wiki pages. When a page is opened that contains a referenced image, the image is loaded from its storage location and displayed. Other multimedia content, such as videos, is embedded in the same way.
Figure: Wiki page with an image
Hierarchically Structured Pages
Wiki pages can be hierarchically structured, and this hierarchy can be displayed to provide navigational assistance.
Figure: Wiki page with a table of contents based on hierarchical structuring
Management Functions
A wiki provides useful free management functions, whereby "free" not only means no license costs, but also no configuration costs.
User Authorisation
You can define read and write permissions. Alphabetical lists, catalogs, and personal portals can be created.
Version management
Wiki systems usually support automatic version management. Each version shows the author who last edited the page and "diffs" can be made, which compare the changes between a revision and its previous versions.
Figure: Version comparison in a wiki
Checking links
The backlink feature is extremely useful for checking the wiki structure. This feature generates a list of all wiki pages that link to a specific wiki page.
Figure: List of all pages that link to a specific wiki page
Export features
You can even export the content of a wiki to make it available for use in other environments.
Figure: XML export of a wiki page
Wiki for Documentation
Due to the obvious advantages of wikis easy exchange of information and free management features Comet recognized the potential benefits of using wikis for documentation purposes early on and has implemented successful wiki projects for glossaries, eduction and project management as well as portals for development input, and style guides for documentation teams.
Wikis in their present form are perhaps not the solution for all documentation requirements. However, the range of existing projects shows that wikis have many possible uses and that, in the near future, wikis may well provide the best solution, if not the only solution for some areas of documentation.
For more information about implementing wiki projects for documentation, visit www.comet.de.
Internet References About Wikis
You can find important information about wikis at the following Internet addresses. This list gives just a small selection of relevant addresses and is by no means complete.
Wiki Platforms
MediaWiki: http://Wikipedia.sourceforge.net
TWiki: http://www.twiki.org
PhpWiki: http://phpwiki.sourceforge.net
Overview of wikis: http://www.wiki.org
Wiki Links
Encyclopedia: http://de.wikipedia.org
Information about wikis: http://meta.wikimedia.org
The first wiki: http://c2.com/cgi/wiki
Comet documentation wiki: http://www.dokupedia.dePublished: 05/2007
Author: Prof. Sissi Closs
| | Prof. Sissi Closs is one of the leading experts in online documentation and XML in Germany. She is co-partner and CEO of Comet Computer and Comet Communication.
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