Re: using a wiki as your primary authoring tool & delivery mechanism

["Sandy Harris" <sandyinchina -at- gmail -dot- com>]

Fiona Krycek <fiona -dot- krycek -at- gmail -dot- com> wrote:

> I am wondering whether anyone out there has experience using a wiki as their
> primary authoring tool and delivery mechanism.

No, but I spend a fair bit of time on various wikis, mostly Wikitravel, a
free online travel guide: http://wikitravel.org/en/Main_Page

> ... how
> best to make the wiki easily searchable (there's tons of information on it).

Good search is built into the mediawiki software

> There are also questions about whether we even want to push people toward
> searching or whether we should be expecting them to use our very lengthy
> table of contents, and so on and so forth.
>
> I unfortunately have little experience with wikis. Does anyone else? As my
> comments above might indicate, I'm primarily interested in navigation, but
> any other guidelines or best practices for doing documentation on a wiki
> would be appreciated. We are using MediaWiki software, if that helps.

There are going to be disagreements over content, perhaps sometimes
degenerating to "edit wars" where A changes the page one way, then B
changes it back, then A, ... Perhaps yours will not be as intense as
some on political or historical content, but they'll happen.

You need some policies to deal with those. Wikipedia talks about
"neutral point of view", Wikitravel "be fair", ... On every wiki I have
seen, each article has a talk page where such issues can be
thrashed out.

Will you have vandals? Many wikis do; wikitravel's pages on USA,
China, Isreal and "Gay and lesbian travel" have all had utterly
over-the-top rants turn up. Then we had a clown moving dozens
of pages to silly titles.

Should only registered users be allowed to edit in an effort to
restrict that?

-- 
Sandy Harris,
Nanjing, China
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