Re: Wiki

Zitat von Paul Reilly <[email protected]>:

> > if we're agreed
> > that we want to move the faq to this kind of a setup.
> >
>
> Just throwing a few ideas around:
>
> * Before deciding to change to wiki why not setup a test one
>   See how it would work for us in practice?

We should have the wiki and the faq side by side for a while. But marking
the wiki as "eventually all the stuff written here will be deleted if it
doesn't work" won't encourage users very much to contribute. ;-)

> * Will the wiki system be similiar to a FAQoMatic?
>   I must say I don't find that good from a usability point
>   of view. Information gets buried and hard to find.
>   low signal to noise ratio.

Not really. While a FAQoMatic isn't very useable indeed it also tends to
have a lot of similar question because the users don't find their exact
problem in an existing question. The strength of wiki is that it isn't
really a question-answer-system (even if we maintain our FAQ with it) but a
bunch of question-answer-pairs that all users can edit (the questions AND
the answers).
The deal is that don't want to have yet another forum where users can ask
questions but a place where users can contribute their
experiences/solutions.

> * The plain HTML FAQ does have many advantages.
>   It's authorative. Good signal to noise.

Indeed. Though it doesn't have to be the case. There are a lot of good
examples where wikis regulate themselves pretty nicely. The best case is
definitely wikipedia that has a great signal to noise ratio.
I found wikis a bit obscure when they started but am very suprised how well
they work. That's why I started this discussion.

> * Some places use a Bulletin Board where the user
>   community helps each other. See for example:
>
>   http://www.macosx.com/forums/

That's what the mailing lists are for.

>   We could have a forum just for user written HOWTO's
>   like the one above.  I know I document my installs and could
>   share my HOWTOS. others probably would too.

A wiki's advantage opposed to such a system is again, that other users can
contribute to such howtos by extending them with their own ideas or
mentioning problems they personally had with this howto.

> * What system does php.net use? They have a user documentation
>   feedback system too.

Yes, but the drawback with this solution is that the users who *read* the
documentation have to merge the information that comes from the authorative
source and the user comments themselves, while in a wiki the users who
*write* the comments have to merge them with the existing documentation.

> My only concerns are that by moving away from a maintained FAQ
> on the website, we'd loose some authorative answers (20 wrong ways and
> one
> right way to do it?) plus the volume of information would increase, but
> the signal to noise ratio would probably go down....

As long as we don't put the wiki into a biosphere that we open after a year
to see what has grown out of it, no. Of course a wiki has to be maintained
too, but I think not more than the current FAQ and also much easier.

Jan.

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