Wiki: The "Next Big Thing" for Technical Writers

After a brief period of thinking about it, I think the Next Big Thing for technical writers is collaborative writing, in the form popularized by Wikipedia.

This has been on my plate for a couple years, and I've seen it as the most useful technology for us, as graduating from "Word Janitors" to Content Managers. A tech writer can be thought of as an orchestrator, pulling together widely disparate information sorces and getting them to look like a homogeneous body of knowledge - just like what Wikipedia protends to do - but with very little actual filtering or information management.

As a tech writer, I believe its my job to find the best solution for the information publishing problem that most businesses and organizations face, and to make that information as understandable and accessible as can practically be done - without being too accessible. I've personally been through the shift businesses have made, from mid-scale printed books to simple online conversions to help files, and now to collaborative writing. So now with wikis, a tech writer's role is managing the quality and consistency of the presentation, while the content experts as a whole provide quality and completeness of information.

Wiki and the Writer

But you may think, any programmer or power user can set up a wiki, so why would a tech writer need to be involved? That's representative the typical short-range thinking that would result in everything but substance. It's template thinking taken to the level of information service. What a technical writer would provide is an output-oriented structure. This is the same thing that happens when a tehcnical document is created: define the organization of the wiki in terms of the information being represented.

But you may argue, a wiki is self-organizing! it doesn't need a rigid, formal structure! That may be true, but in the case of Wikipedia, and even the Web, this occurs only after many iterations of self-organization have been tried and discarded. It's time-consuming and wasteful. The techncial writer helps to map out what the wiki will cover, and diverting content to the appropriate channels. (This is the same as defining the scope and the audience.) This activity shows to the content experts what the indended form of the wiki presentation. It also clarifies the status of the project: how much is done, waht is the quality level of what's been done, and what still needs to be done. That's typical project management activity for a tech writer.

Then you have stylistic issues, like the presentation template. That's the part that defines the page layout, top-level links, drill-down mappings (if applicable), fonts, colors, sizes and so-on. It's similar to document templates and cascading stylesheets. That's no-brainer stuff for a tech writer, and is easy to change.

But you don't have to agree with me about wikis being the Next Big Thing. As long as you believe that something coming up Next is going to be Big.