Just doing a little data mining of the posts I’ve written about DITA in the last few years. I think that there’s a gap for DITA users who are writers or content creators and not coders. I’d like to say that DITA bloggers can bridge that gap. Join me on the DITA blog by writing your own experiences with DITA.

These posts are ordered from newest to oldest, and I wrote them to share my experiences with DITA and to chronicle some of the Central Texas DITA User Group meetings I attended.

A watched folder for publishing from DITA source files

June 15, 2007: I’ve figured out a way to automate DITA builds where you just drop a zip file of your DITA source files into a “watched folder” and PDF and CHM files are automatically built.

Usability and inline links in user assistance systems

May 19, 2007: Examining DITA’s linking and usability.

Getting Started with DITA

April 12, 2007: A brief overview for a couple of fellow Austin writers who have asked me recently how and where to get started with DITA.

Checking out the new DITA Users website

April 10, 2007: Using a coupon code (it’s BETA) I joined the new DITA Users website for free today.

A new DITA Open ToolKit release and brand new DITA newbie blog

October 04, 2006 : A couple of blog-worthy items in the DITA world

Turning information into DITA topics

September 14, 2006: What would you do to make this particular type of content into topics?

How to substitute your custom CSS when using DITA Open Toolkit transforms

September 07, 2006 : When you want to use the DITA Open Toolkit transforms but you want to use your own CSS, here’s how to substitute your CSS for HTML Help (CHM)

DITA Open ToolKit now has a User Guide

August 22, 2006: Just released last week, the DITA Open ToolKit now has its own User Guide

Using the DITA catalog for your specializations, creating a Public ID

August 16, 2006 : Thought our discovery might help you as you specialize DITA

Evaluating XML editors for DITA

August 01, 2006: Notes from the July 2006 Central Texas DITA User Group meeting

A web-form-based DITA editor

July 14, 2006: Could this be the perfect storm for a DITA wiki?

Troubleshooting tip for the DITA Open Toolkit install

June 23, 2006 : Finally figured out the fix for my DITA Open Toolkit “resource/messages.xml” not found error

Where to put your files and other setup for DITA

June 09, 2006: Working with the environment setup for DITA

Defining OPML and relating to DITA maps

May 31, 2006: I found a nice definition for OPML from whatis.com as their word of the day, and I’m starting to wonder about similarities between OPML and DITA maps

Learning more about DITA

May 18, 2006: Learning about how to get started with DITA and a trivia item for fun

Notes from the central Texas DITA user group meeting

April 21, 2006: Two speakers shared their takeaways from DITA 2006 and CMS 2006

Our DITA experience at BMC Software

March 02, 2006: Link to a case study published about BMC’s DITA experience

DITA from the trenches

February 20, 2006: Information Architect from IBM, Kristin Thomas, presented to the Central Texas DITA User’s Group meeting last week, and here are my notes.

Moving from Books to Topic-oriented Writing

January 27, 2006 : A report from JoAnn Hackos’ talk at the Central Texas DITA Users Group meeting January 2006

DITA and wiki combo

December 05, 2005: Darwin Information Typing Architecture, meet Wiki.

Darwin Information Typing Architecture – DITA (dih tuh)

November 04, 2005: Roundup of the DITA reading I’ve been diving back in to lately.

Inner gang? Mini empires? Am I talking about the online encyclopedia, Wikipedia? Why yes, yes I am. I’m reading “Who Writes Wikipedia” which is a study on how Wikipedia is edited and maintained. Is it really “a small group of colleagues working together toward a common goal?” A small group wrote that much content in about four years?

I’m interested in this subject because Wikipedia is a wonderful reference site full of content that usually is accurate and rings of authority even though it is maintained with an all-volunteer content creation and editing team. Seeing it and liking the results, I wonder how a wiki could be used in a similar fashion to build technical documentation sites that are user-built and maintained while offering the best, most thorough, most accurate technical information about a certain product or technical subject. Could we really get as valuable a reference for product doc by having a “small group of colleagues working together towards a common goal” — a goal of an excellent set of product documentation online?

Outsiders provide content, insiders clean it up

Come to find out, according to the article, over half of the edits are done by less than 1% of the users, about 500 people are considered to be the inner circle of editors, building consistency in wording and categories while fixing typos and editing content where needed to build more quality into each entry. The most active group of about 1400 people have done nearly three-quarters of all the edits. These statistics and claims are made by Jimbo Wales, the face of Wikipedia. Now, the article’s author, Aaron Swartz, tracks a few more nuances of this claim by studying random wikipedia entries, such as the one for Alan Alda. And here is his conclusion based on his study:

When you put it all together, the story become clear: an outsider makes one edit to add a chunk of information, then insiders make several edits tweaking and reformatting it. In addition, insiders rack up thousands of edits doing things like changing the name of a category across the entire site — the kind of thing only insiders deeply care about. As a result, insiders account for the vast majority of the edits. But it’s the outsiders who provide nearly all of the content.

Wiki for tech doc

Now, I’d like to try to translate this to what might work well for a wiki geared toward product documentation. You’d need a core set of very knowledgeable content providers, like a team of experienced users of the product. Those users would contribute a core body of knowledge to the wiki, and hopefully choose to first document the items that are either most popular tasks or the most-referenced information or the toughest concepts to grasp. Most likely that would be the subject matter they’d be most familiar with anyway.

But is there vandalism?

It also appears that my wiki graffiti concerns are likely unfounded… the article says, “A tiny handful — probably around 5 out of nearly 400 — were “vandalism”: confused or malicious people adding things that simply didn’t fit, followed by someone undoing their change. That’s such a small percentage, just over a tenth of a percent, that it seems for the most part there are few writers with malicious intent in their edits.

Real wiki writers tell their experiences

Reading through the comments, I also appreciated the “user experiences” from people who are actively editing Wikipedia content. One commenter notes that he “went crazy” adding content in areas where he had knowledge but found that once his knowledge limitations were surpassed or the well was dry, he went into a maintenance mode. With a “burst of new knowledge” he’d add more content to those areas but found those to be few and far between. I think that with product documentation a similar ebb and flow would occur — knowledge or experience with a relatively new feature would cause activity on certain articles but then maintenance would occur again.

How do you get enough contributors?

Probably the major limiter for a product documentation wiki that’s maintained by users is that the user base would have to be significantly large in order to draw enough content providers. If 500 people maintain Wikipedia, you’d probably need 50,000 users to get 500 committed people to provide content (or would you actually need half a million?).

How do you ensure consistency?

Wikipedia has a basic information model to follow that most people are familiar with, also — the encyclopedia and it’s article-like writing style and the content you expect to see in an encyclopedia is well known and the style is easily copied by any writer. Product reference would need some excellent modeling to follow, which is why I lurve the idea of a DITA wiki — structured content models that 500 people could follow consistently, writing concept topics, tasks, or reference topics on a regular basis.

I’m warming up to the wiki

We can learn a lot from Wikipedia’s success and I plan to continue to track their progress as it evolves and more policy is put in place. Perhaps the wiki has potential as a great product doc format.

What do you think as a writer? Would you be willing to write and maintain content for product doc in a wiki? What do you think as a product user? Would you want to read and would you trust the content provided by thousands of fellow product users? Maybe I should experiment by combining the two groups — user and writer — and start a FrameMaker wiki. Surely the FrameMaker user base just isn’t large enough to generate the content it would need to succeed. What do you think?