A Deviation Wiki?

Hi folks,

I really like the idea of a Wiki for Deviation. There are a lot of features that could do with documenting, and with the pace of development and community nature I can't help feel a Wiki makes a more natural fit than a formal PDF.

I'd happily volunteer a bit of time to write up some sections, or transfer the existing manual, and if needed I could help with the setup of a Wiki server or service too.

Some Wiki's allow you to export as PDF too, so if we structured it carefully it might be possible to generate the manual from the Wiki documentation.

What do you think PB? Would you mind giving the community a go at taking on the work of documenting Deviation?

Myx

Nice idea, I will contribute as well.

Bitbucket offers a way to add a Wiki to a repository. It is also a mercurial repository which can be handled similar, but there is also a web interface for creating and changing pages (similar to the issue editor).
I have setup a fast example here: rbe's testwiki . I have set it to public open - everybody can read, but writing seems to be restricted. I have allowed PhracturedBlue and myxiplx to write.

The main problems I see with a Wiki:

• structuring is hard (not impossible, but needs some care)
• we would have to conclude if anyone should be able to write text or if we have an editors team who decide which changes will be included (similar to a merge of code...) (for the bitbucket wiki the first might not work at all)

Hi rbe, it's a nice idea but with no inline editor it's going to be inaccessible to a lot of people.

Ideally I'd prefer something that's managed completely online, however, at the moment I suspect that everybody who's interested in helping out is either familiar with IT or programming tools, and capable of working with bitbucket.

I'll leave the idea to stew for a bit, I'm pretty new to the Deviation forums so don't want to be too pushy

Hmm... anybody know if Joomla articles can have internal hyperlinks? Can the articles become a more formal Wiki?

That would be ok as far as I'm concerned, this wants to be fairly structured anyway. The main thing I think would be useful is having the content online in an easily linkable and editable form.

There's a potential concern if we're duplicating information that's in the manual, we'd need to think how best to organise the two.

A bit of experience - Our company is doing end-to-end product development (HW design, manufacturing, Embedded firmware and PC/web front-ends) and we tried the Wiki approach to manage information.

We soon realised is strength is also it biggest weakness - to unstructured and due to many reasons already mentioned here, it is not ideal for formal documentation / information management / transfer of evolving products and technology.

Very much as PB suggest, we have our formal documents (specs/manuals/How-to's as version controlled PDF documents that gets formally release per official product release, with much of the information pulled from the Wiki pages.

Here we have the Forum for the unstructured information sharing and we should rather volunteer to help PB with the drafting and updating the formal documentation on Bitbucket for each official release.

RBE and I started documenting the model.ini options through a Bitbucket repository a while ago and I suggest we do the same for the other required Manuals / How-to documents.