I’ve had a couple of encounters this week that have me thinking a bit more about wikis and their place in technical documentation.

The first was a post I came across on Tom Johnson’s blog, I’d Rather Be Writing, “Findablity and The Information Paradox“.  Here’s the key statement:

The more information you add to a help file, the more informative it becomes because it contains more information. However, as you add more information to your help file, it also becomes less informative because it’s harder for users to find that information.

Writing for an enterprise product, as I do, I definitely appreciate the concern expressed here.  And I’ve certainly experienced the problem first-hand:  users, even experienced internal users, often have difficulty finding the information they need in the volume of documentation we provide.  As often as not, the (imperfect) solution is to use the “tech writer search engine”; the writers wrote it, so they probably know where to find it.  (That assumption usually turns out correct, BTW.)  One major part of the problem, especially for customers, is that the user often doesn’t know what they need, so they don’t know how to search for it.

At first glance, opening the wiki to user contributions, as I’ve recommended, would seem to exacerbate this problem; more users contributing more content only adds to the clutter and makes finding the information even harder.  But if the 90/9/1 rule described by Anne Gentle in Conversation and Community is correct, this is not very likely to be a problem.  The 90/9/1 rule states that 90 percent of users lurk, 9 percent comment, and only one percent actually contribute.  It would take a very large community indeed before 1 percent contributed sufficient content to create a true problem.  Moreover, in Tom Johnson’s case, he was adding the documentation he thought was necessary, while in the community zone of the wiki, the users themselves are contributing the content, giving them more of a stake in it.
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This user stake is enhanced if the wiki is part of a community infrastructure, including a robust forum.  The community itself is likely to build an “institutional memory” that will help address the findability problem.  Most contributors will let the community know when they’ve contributed something (whether out of ego or altruism); others are likely to remember and when the information, or similar information is requested, they can point to the original contribution.  So if Tae-min contributes a topic he thought was needed, and later Somnath asked about something similar, Igor might remember Tae-min’s contribution and suggest it to Somnath.

The second encounter I had was with someone involved in producing documentation for products related to health care and medicine.  When the conversation turned to wikis, she expressed doubts about her users would embrace a wiki, or at least the more communal aspects of wikis, due to concerns over proprietary information.   As I’ve thought about it, I wonder if the heavy regulation of the health-care industry might also play a role inhibiting adoption and embrace of wikis, forums, and other community approaches to documentation delivery.

Here, I’m on less certain ground, partly because I’m not in the health care industry (though, like all of us, I’m definitely a consumer!).  Still, it seems like community approaches to documentation have benefits that are worth investigating, and certainly the generation currently entering the workforce is much more accustomed to robust communities, and will bring their preferences and experiences with them.  It seems like a area ripe for investigation and experimentation.