socialmedian: A Few Surprises in Using a Wiki for Documentation

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A Few Surprises in Using a Wiki for Documentation

Submitted by Avi from Google Reader

Oct 29, 2009

Summary

Recently I’ve been working on a simple calendar project that uses a wiki for documentation. Although I’ve heard a lot about using wikis for documentation, and have even used them in the past, I ran into a few surprises this time.

1. Authoring directly on a wiki screws up the history of updates.

The way wikis work, every time someone makes an edit, it’s recorded in a history for the page. When I write, I make a lot of little updates here and there, not just within one section, but across multiple sections. I can make 10 updates, apparently, in one minute (or so someone told me, who complained that I was mucking up the revision history). I like to hit Save Page often, especially if I have the whole page in edit mode (Microsoft has taught me well). When I save frequently, the version history becomes somewhat useless, as it just shows my name a million times.