Doing some reading about Wikis lately and there's a pretty good essay on Microdoc News that points out that "Blogs Turn People into WebPages" and "Wikis Turn Communities into WebPages". I also spent some time rooting around in Wikipedia. This provoked some thoughts about the comm portal:
The developers are currently using wikis for much of the system documentation. Some aspects of this are good: It's easy to update and maintain pages and links, it's collaborative, it lowers the barriers to getting things documented (for most of us anyway). Some are not so good: It encourages a certain amount of chaos, some things like linking requirements to planning docs to code are more difficult. But I think it's mostly a good thing.
Anyway, my half-formed thoughts are:
- Wikis are a good idea for the comm portal
- If we're going to use Wikis, let's use one that's a little more cooked and a little better documented than UseModWiki. The Wikipedia Wiki for instance. Using this one would enable us to just link to the Wikipedia docs and style guides.
- Reduce some of the chaos by having good docs and style guides
- We need better software for managing project documents or we need to more fully embrace a low-documentation development methodology like XP
- Sourceforge doesn't cut it, at least not the way we're using it.
9:33:29 AM 
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