Yet another wiki

Why do we need yet another wiki for DITA users?

There already are two important "DITA wikis".

• The first is the wiki for the OASIS DITA Technical Committee. It is accessible only to members of OASIS who are on the TC or its various subcommittees so that they can do TC work. DITA TC Wiki (login required).
  
  
• The second is the wiki that is part of the DITA Focus Area, a subsection of the Drupal-based website at dita.xml.org. It is also used for OASIS work but can be edited by anyone with a login. While Drupal is an excellent "CMS-Lite," its wiki is not an enterprise-class wiki like the MediaWiki that powers the Wikipedia and which we use here. DITA Focus Area Wiki

Comments and Discussions

For some time, there has been talk that we need pages to support comments and discussions which can provide feedback to the DITA Architects. For example, specific feedback on every DITA language element. There are multiple versions of the architectural and language specifications on the web. We recently published one in an Eclipse Help format at DITA Infocenter as a proof of DITA Help publishing. But discussions are not supported. Compare the "Discuss this page" in the footer below and the "Post a comment" in the left navigation.

History and Archives

Drupal does not keep versions of its pages. For example, every month we edit the Boston DITA User Group page, and we have to remove earlier descriptive material. We must create a new summary of each meeting and add it to the bottom of the latest page. Reporting monthly meetings is not a wiki function. See When to Wiki, When to Blog.

Search

Drupal searches all the pages on the CMS, not only the "wiki" sub section. This can of course have benefits. But compare the double Search function on this site in the banner above. The Go button returns pages that have the name in your search string. The Search button does a full-text search.

Content

For whatever reason, the wiki subsection of the DITA Focus Area does not have a great deal of content. It has 8 pages, of which two have a few sub-pages. Our DITA Wiki has over 450 pages and growing by dozens of pages each week.

Many organizations think they only need set up a wiki and it will magically get filled up with a complete knowledge base. I call this "wikifull thinking." Wikis need tender loving care - seeding, feeding, and weeding - if they are to attract the critical mass of contributors and visitors that makes them a success.

Watch this page

You can receive email notifications when a page you are moderating is changed by someone.

Spam control

It's always a chore to keep spam under control and wikis are the most difficult. MediaWiki pages are individually lockable.

Wiki at a glance

MediaWiki has a wonderful "show all pages" feature. Try it. It also shows popular pages, new pages, recently changed pages, pages that link to this page (see the footer), etc.

Anne Gentle on Wikis Anne Gentle of ASI has provided these specific suggestions for our DITA Users wiki:

1) In order to get incoming search engine hits and traffic, pre-build the wiki with content.
(Agreed! We now have 450+ pages and a lot more to add before official announcements. See them all here.)
2) Recruit core content contributors and editors and give them as much freedom of content selection and organization to prove that you trust your fellow DITA users.
3) Keep the community alive by communicating early and often with a blog and a mailing list.
(See our DITA Blog and DITA News mailing list.)
4) Jazz it with some social network features such as RSS feeds, integration with digg, reddit, and other such sites, so that DITA users interact more often.
5) When people ask about reasons for your success, point them to your users.

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