But seriously, Craig, nice post. Great to see/hear/read cogent thoughts on “new media” (wikis) meeting “old media” (e-docs), and not losing sight of enterprise concerns, and from within the bowels of a big “old media” solution provider.

For anyone interested in lending a hand (and brain), we just launched our Enterprise 2.0 survey, and can always use more responses. It covers a wide swath of landscape, at 67 questions, and will take you somewhere around 20-30 minutes to complete (you can save your place and come back in a 2nd pass if you like), but we believe we’re going to uncover some fresh thinking and data with this.

Take a peek at the survey at http://aiimMarketIntelligence.questionpro.com. (let’s see what markup you’ve got running here Craig – copy and paste the URL as necessary, should it not survive the journey)

Survey respondents get an early peak at the findings, and anyone is eligible for the full writeup, gratis, due out mid/end March. So either way, keep an eye out, if you’re interested in things wiki or in the broader Enterprise 2.0 realm.

As someone in the information lifecycle profession, “wikis ‘R’ content.” Wikis can (should?) be backed by a backend that can distinguish when collaborative authoring is purely free-form, when it becomes actionable, and when it becomes part of deeper, broader business processes. That is, a wiki (i.e. its presentation and interaction) can be married to a platform such as EMC Documentum so that all information produced and consumed in an enterprise of any size can be archived, transformed, distributed, protected and versioned, regardless of its point of origin or consumption.

I’d like to know what Sarah and her professional community sees in terms such integration’s benefits, opportunities, priorities and challenges. There is a significant technical publications team I work with that would love to participate in this discussion, too.

One site that I think does this well is the MySQL documentation, where the user comments are often more valuable than the documentation itself…giving you all the gotchas and resolutions when the process in the docs goes wrong.

http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/upgrading-to-arch.html

It would be nice to attach a minimal amount of metadata to each comment for filtering…for example, you may want to have a score for comments so that the community could “+1″ those that were relevant/important. Also, attaching a release tag to a comment could allow a filter for “comments only relevant to 5.3″. So I guess an aggregate score based on age, release version, and user points could assist in keeping the most relevant comments at the top.

With this type of scoring, it becomes less necessary to have a formal Administrator screen every comment. The community provides the fitness score.

Another colleague suggested the following lessons from this particular project: “They already had a ghost-written first draft, which also makes it pretty intimidating to jump in and start changing things when they’re already laid out in a nice narrative form. The resulting book will be largely ghost-written with presumably some ancedotes filled in from the participants. Affordances of the wiki/discussion software, size of the chunks to be edited, and there’s probably some others in there too. It’s been a remarkably “faceless” project. I imagine a celebrity guru like Seth Godin could have whipped the acolytes into a frenzy. The usual lessons on bootstraping a new community. Again IMHO too much b-school and McKinsey-ite strategery, and not enough grass-roots movement.”

What is your experience with wikis?

Do you see “the need for a strong editor who ensures that the necessary information is provided, guides the community to flesh out areas that need attention, culls obsolete material, guides the architecture by creating page and object templates, and evangelizes the use of the wiki?” If you work with open source, do you see the typical lead-committer-contributor-lurker model as applicable to wikis (i.e. applies equally well to code or documentation)? What models and roles are successful in the wikis you find most compelling?

This is a good idea.

We have integrated our Docbook publishing process from Subversion into our project website recently.

The idea is that customers can link tickets, wiki pages, comments into the docbook.
This close feedback loop within the documentation is really fantastic as it keeps it alive.

An additional feature can be to merge the comments automatically back into the docbook via XUpdate to facilitate the authoring process.

We have used Ruby Lucene implementation(Ferret) in order to use ‘more like this’ functionality between the content.(tickets, wiki, external websites, docbook).