Technical Writing – Why Really should You Pay Attention to Wikis?
In case you are not also familiar with it, Wiki is a web internet site that can be built by a lot of authors together. That’s its most simple definition. thehiddenwiki.org “wiki” comes from Hawaiian “quick.” Wikipedia is the world’s most effective known wiki but, as critical as it is, it barely scratches the surface of the wiki applications on and off the World wide web.
Let’s clear up a semantic point: a “wiki” refers both to a net site and the application that makes the net web page possible. And the reason I say “on and off the Internet” since there are several high-tech organizations around the globe now who are creating their personal wiki sites hosted on their own servers, which can or can’t be reached by way of the Online. Some wikis are for the exclusive use of membership groups.
The power of a wiki is the way it allows multiple authors pool their information and experiences and construct up a information base significantly quicker than a single author could ever do it. Just appear at how Wikipedia has replaced quite a few other standard paper-primarily based encyclopedias, specially for the under-30 generation.
The cause why you ought to pay interest to wikis and discover far more about them is because higher-tech corporations have began to shift their documentation load to wikis where not only technical writers but engineers, field technicians, good quality control engineers, managers, and even consumers and end-customers can also participate in understanding creation. The on the internet aid software creator Quadralay is 1 such company that opened up its understanding base to its finish-customers by means of a corporate wiki. In such a new environment, technical communicators shoulder the editing and facilitation roles as effectively.
Be the first a single in your enterprise to discover as substantially as you can about wikis. How many forms are there? How should really one particular select the correct wiki for the ideal job? How to set it up? How to configure it? How to create for a wiki? Create your own writing recommendations and be in front of this crucial technological wave. The future belongs to the “fast” and the “wiki.”