Rock? Maybe but probably not
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| Author | Content |
|---|---|
| rnturn Jun 02, 2015 11:22 PM EDT |
I see too much wiki-based documentation that tends to degenerate into spaghetti documentation. Too much of a tendency for instructional information to get scattered across too many separate pages making it more difficult to get through, say, a complex installation process, without jumping back and forth between multiple pages or taking you farther and farther away from the initial information you were reading. I've encountered wiki-based documentation that had multiple pages that explain the same topic in slightly different ways. Which one of those pages should you follow, i.e., which page is actually correct? Will those pages will ever get corrected or removed? (This isn't really the fault of the wiki itself but rather the authors and their managers who don't organize their information properly to fit into a wiki model.) Then there's the limitations of the wiki markup language. For documenting procedures, easily producing numbered sections is nearly impossible. A stray blank line introduced into the wiki text can totally scramble any list numbering. (I'm talking about /you/ Wikimedia. You can number major/minor sections in the Table of Contents but can't number the section headings themselves? Really?) A decent word processor would be easier for authors to use to produce good documentation. I'd much rather open a well organized word processor document or a PDF than endure too much more poorly done wiki-based documentation. |
| JaseP Jun 03, 2015 8:45 AM EDT |
A decent Wiki requires an active community of developers and advanced users. That said,... even MythTV's wiki, for example, waxes and wanes between being really useful and having too much out-of-date junk,... and that's a BIG project with a lot of users. |
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