Review of “WIKI: Grow your own for fun and profit”

XML Press kindly sent me a reviewer’s copy of Alan J. Porter’s book “WIKI: Grow your own for fun and profit”. I interviewed Alan earlier in the year (which you can see on the Cherryleaf YouTube Channel), so it was good to see the book that he was mentioning in the interview.

It’s important not to think that wikis only = Wikipedia. You could argue that applications such as Confluence and Mindtouch 2010 are wikis as well – wikis enhanced with powerful tools for software user documentation, but wikis, nonetheless.

As Scott Abel says in the introduction, most organisations have yet to manage the art of managing content. They make two common mistakes: (1) they see content as either documents or structured data, and (2) they see it as purely a software problem.

Wikis offer technical communicators a handy route into an organisations for them to tackle poor content. That’s because wiki software is generally very cheap and the techies like them. There are still issues around “round tripping” (getting content in and out, and back in again) and link management, but these are not insurmountable.

Alan, I’m pleased to say, has not been seduced by the software, but has set the use of a wiki within a very usable framework. He’s spot on when it comes to the benefits a wiki can offer and the implementation approach to take.