TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

Anne Gentle: Are wikis good for creating manuals and e-books?

By Robert Nagle

While David is busy testing his newly arrived XO laptop, here’s a side-by-side comparison of the Kindle vs. the XO laptop by Austin technical writer Anne Gentle. Gentle recently prepared a 100% web-based XO manual optimized for the XO browser. Austin writer Anne Gentle writes widely about technical issues and made huge contributions to the XO Quick Start guide. Here’s her piece about how she transformed that same manual from a wiki into a web-based manual for XO users. (Hint: she did it with a commercial documentation tool called AuthorIT).

She also links to a Flossmanuals, a site hosting manuals for various open source manuals (like Audacity, Azureus, Mplayer), etc. This site is another wiki-editing initiative that is more geared to producing technical manuals.

Gentle writes:

The journey to Floss Manuals is going to be interesting for several reasons. One is, which wiki is source? Floss Manuals or wiki.laptop.org? Adam and I will likely have to get notifications on each wiki and attempt to keep them synced. I’m also trying to design for re-use because it’s easy to remix manuals in Floss Manuals. So there should be a way to use content from the simplifed user guide where kids are the audience for the teacher or instructor’s guide. The translation workflow in Floss Manuals lets the translator view both text side by side, which will be helpful I believe, but there’s no translation memory.

Gentle has discussed the subject of wikis-as-document production tools several times over the past year. (She made a fascinating presentation a few months ago about how to wikify your doc set). In several places she speculates about how wikis could incorporate more aspects from the DITA model to produce useful technical manuals. In another analytical piece, she adds:

Some folks are pre-populating their wikis with book content, which is always an interesting test of what parts of a book are considered essential for “bookness” or “wikiness” - do you keep a table of contents? Is there any index? What page metaphors do you subscribe to in the wiki? These questions can be answered by looking for examples and analyzing their success. I especially like using wikis for the wiki aspects that go above and beyond books. For example, I’ve been exploring the Meatball Wiki site (Thanks Janet!) - and they have an excellent page with all sorts of Indexing Schemes categorized, such as Readership and Authorship which are fascinating for use in wikis as opposed to books. The Ontology category seems the most book-like to me, and I really like how that page offers ideas for all the possibilities that wiki offers.

(A slightly dissenting view comes from the Rockley Group blog).

Gentle also mentions the topic of wiki-slicing (defined on wikipedia as “collection of materials gathered from a public wiki and packaged into a reusable form”). See this good introduction to wikislicing and a website devoted to wikislices).

In an interview with Tom Johnson about wikis, she addresses the distribution of labor question:

You found that with Wikipedia, fewer than 1 percent of users contribute more than half the edits. Should technical writers expect the same 1 percent user contribution effort with the wikis they create?
I just read on keycontent.org that even the MSDN wiki has 5 top contributors. Of the 1876 contributors, 5 contributors (three from Microsoft) made about 1500 of the edits (out of 5800 edits). I believe you should expect a similar contribution effort as long as those numbers continue to be displayed in other wikis. I suppose the key is recruiting and maintaining relationships with those users. And really, you probably want just a few core inner circle type of people so that you can maintain positive relationships. It’s like an active listserv - you can probably count on one or two hands who the inner circle of contributors are. Those are your experts who are also helpful and giving.

By definition, wikis are initiated and edited by people who are nonexperts about a topic. Then, does a wiki still work? Lion Kimbro made an eloquent defense of the nonexpert as wiki contributor.

I cannot be sure, of course: Who can know? But I’ve been sketching out some ideas that I call “Wiki-as-you-Learn.” And “beginners reworking.”

The idea is that people who are less knowledgable about a subject very much should be a primary actor in the authoring of the text. Not the sole actor- you need experienced people to perform correction, offer up alternative explanations, to make sure that it’s not wrong. But I think that beginners have unique advantages in teaching other beginners. Reasons: They understand their own misunderstandings. They have strong empathy with other learners, because they are at the same place, or just a single step beyond. The beginner is motivated by the need to make their understanding more concrete. (As different than the bored expert, (this is not a criticism, just noting a fact,) who has already covered the subject material a million times over.) It is conceivable that a vast lattice or network of beginners can, if properly made to understand what they are doing and why and how, and that there are people who will correct them if they mis-state a thing, that they could make far better artifacts for teaching, than the teachers themselves.

One example I like to point people to is the “Hippo Family Club” series of books, including the amazing “Who is Fourier?” (Read the reviews!) The book teaches Fourier, from the beginning, assuming only that the reader knows what a triangle is. It’s a fantastic book, people swear by it, and it’s written by students who were learning Fourier. Lots of diagrams, lots of plain language explanations, etc., etc.,.; By-beginners, for-beginners, supervised by experts. No doubt the kids made mistakes as they were learning & authoring, and they were corrected by experts, to keep the text in course.

The idea is that a text by beginners, for beginners, can be far better than a conventional textbook written by an expert, even a hypertext written by an expert, and can conceivably even be perpetually developing and growing stronger, as readers who climb the way up take responsibility for smoothing the path behind them.

Can it happen? Is it real? Is it pragmatic? We’ll find out, I suppose.

Using wikis for content production has raised all kinds of technical, social and even philosophical questions. (The Wikipatterns site attempts to address these concerns). In addition to practical questions of accuracy, respect for copyright and bias, there is also the question of editions. Every time an wiki is edited, you have created another edition. Perhaps the newer version is marginally different or even better, but if a book or essay or novel is constantly evolving, a book is left unfinished..and thus a book cannot ever be fully read…unless one lives for an eternity.