What Does DITA Have To Do With Wiki

What does DITA have to do with Wiki? Information development models and implementation ideas Central Texas DITA Users Group January 23, 2008

Introductions
Ben Allums - Quadralay WebWorks
Chris Almond – IBM
Anne Gentle - OLPC
Ragan Haggard - Sun

Why use a wiki?
Originally created in 1995 for making quick web pages
Cross-platform, cross-browser
Encourage collaboration - simultaneous edits
Encourage crowdsourcing and customer's view point
Living, breathing, changing documentation
Easy linking to other wiki pages
Subscription-based RSS feeds of recent changes, "watch" pages for edits
Easy searches within the body of the wiki
Scalability - many pages edited by many authors
May save on customer support calls (eBay wiki)
Customer might expect a wiki when a customer forum isn't enough
Open source products often use wikis (Apache wiki)
Registration and log ins can control authoring privileges

Case study questions from WikiPatterns book
Why did you choose a wiki?
What type of wiki are you using?
How are you using the wiki?
What changes have you seen as a result of using the wiki?
Looking at WikiPatterns.com, which patterns or anti-patterns are in place?
Have you done anything to encourage one pattern or squash out an anti-pattern?

Case study - WebWorks Wiki http://wiki.webworks.com/
Mailing lists and forums discounted due to redundancy (existing “wwp-users”) and high moderation requirements
Already using them in Development
Enables public project workspaces, a “garage” for projects
Excellent place to “distill” reference materials

MoinMoin
Active community
Theme support
Parser plug-ins (support for XML, ReStructured Text, alternate Wiki markup languages, source code)
Product integration options Wiki Publishing

FAQ
Tips and Tricks
Developer documentation
Projects – Enhancements
Staging area for documentation enhancements

Community self-help
Outlet for extended Support
Quick delivery of missing documentation
Customers honing their information requests

People Patterns: Invitation
Adoption Patterns: Built-in obsolescence, Community Write, Magnet, Scaffold
Adoption Anti-patterns: PageOwnership, Sandbox

Patterns
Actively request uses to place widely used “recipes” in the Wiki
AuthorGroup editable by AuthorGroup
Template pages and “New Page” forms
GUI edits despite potential side-effects
Anti-Patterns
Comment boxes – Any level of involvement is welcome
Ownership of home page (“FirstLast”) to reduce Wikiphobia

Requirements for creating a “Wiki Company”
Identify your wiki’s goals
Get everything out of people’s heads, white boards, Inboxes
Focus on effectiveness, not perfection
Train all users
Create a hands-on lab
Get people over the “Wikiphobia hump”
Define workflows within the wiki as needed to promote the value of wiki use
Services quotes
Product designs
Suggestions

What does DITA have to do with Wiki?
Maybe nothing
How much training will you require of your domain specialists?
You have one hour to teach them
Wiki markup
Base DITA topic structure
Your specialized DITA topic structure

Goals
Projects
Good, Fast, Cheap
Pick Two
Content
Knowledge, Reuse, Structure
Pick One?
Content goal for Wiki?
Knowledge capture sounds pretty good

Avoid the “Tyranny of One”
Content authored by domain specialists will rarely/never be used directly
Explore the “Sluice Box” concept
Raw Wiki
DITA topics Wiki
Specialized DITA Topics Wiki
Leverage “ SisterSites ” – Review changes to information as necessary

Case study - IBM BlueWiki (internal)

Case Study – One Laptop Per Child
Why did you choose a wiki? OLPC chose a wiki as an open source solution to offering information to developer volunteers initially, but end-users also need documentation in their wiki.
What type of wiki are you using? Mediawiki and Floss Manuals, which runs on TWiki, a structured wiki.
How are you using the wiki? wiki.laptop.org contains all information about the XO laptop, but Floss Manuals contains targeted information for certain audiences. The structured nature of the wiki would let us re-use content for different audiences such as kids, parents, school admins, or teachers.
What changes have you seen as a result of using the wiki? Since they started with it from the beginning, the only changes I’d say I observed was my own learning and building of mental models for the use of wikis for information storage.

Case Study – One Laptop Per Child
Looking at WikiPatterns.com, which patterns or anti-patterns are in place? The Invitation pattern is a nicely done people pattern. They also have a nice Starting point on the OLPC wiki. And Welcoming is definitely a part of their best practices, even though it’s very difficult for them to keep up with the interest in volunteering.
Have you done anything to encourage one pattern or squash out an anti-pattern? I know there have been acts of Vandalism on people’s talk pages, but those just get reversed immediately by a very on-their-toes administrator. I guess the act was in retaliation for an answer someone gave in an FAQ. I also see a little bit of ThreadMess going on with some development-oriented pages.

Is wiki source or output?
Wikislices - using a DITA map to keep up with wiki “topic” (article) changes
DITA Storm – web-enabled DITA editor, but not very wiki-like
DITA to wikitext XSLT transform, but no round trip, have writers determine what content goes back to DITA source

Case study - Sun OpenDS Wiki https://www.opends.org/wiki
Why did you choose a wiki? To create and distribute open-source technical documentation and so gain the contributions from the wider community.
What type of wiki are you using? JSPWiki
How are you using the wiki? www.opends.org/wiki provides user doc and developer documentation for an open source directory service.
What changes have you seen as a result of using the wiki? The wiki enables me to work 24 hours a day.

Case study - Sun OpenDS Wiki https://www.opends.org/wiki
Looking at WikiPatterns.com, which patterns or anti-patterns are in place? Have you done anything to encourage one pattern or squash out an anti-pattern? Oddly enough, I promote the EmptyPages anti-pattern as a way for users to communicate their wish list to the community. We also persist in the Sandbox anti-pattern, because we think its useful. We're also planning to maintain the Registration Required anti-pattern because we need contributors to accept our terms of use and registration is the mechanism for that. Plus, I'm apprehensive about the amount of vandalism that would occur without registration.

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What Does DITA Have To Do With Wiki

by Anne Gentle on Jan 23, 2008

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