Once you make the decision to start using a wiki, whether to foster internal collaboration or for external delivery, you need to pick your wiki software. Selecting a wiki platform is no easy task, as literally dozens of options are available.
You could turn to a site such as WikMatrix (www.wikimatrix.org). This site not only lists a variety of available wikis, with a brief assessments of their features, but includes a Wiki Choice Wizard (http://www.wikimatrix.org/wizard.php) to help you select a wiki. Unfortunately, this wizard is not very useful, as it asks such questions as your preferred backend (database, text file, or revision comparison system), language, hosting options, and preferred programming language.
These issues are all important to a wiki programmer, but they’re not the important questions facing a technical writer or documentation manager, who has a very different set of concerns. When I began working with wikis, I worked out a different set of questions, based on my needs as someone that develops and delivers product documentation:
Scalability
A small product may only require a few dozen pages, but even a moderately complex product could require hundreds of pages. Depending on the number of products you support, the complexity of those products, and the number of versions of each product you support, you can easily generate and manage several thousand pages. Not all wikis scale to thousands of pages effectively.
Multiple Layers of Security
When delivering documentation for a product, in particular for a proprietary product, you will want to provide multiple layers of access. At a minimum, you want to ensure that members of your documentation team can add and modify the content but that the general public cannot. But you may want to consider even more complex model. For example, you may want to allow anyone to read your content, but only allow customers to comment on it. Alternatively, you may want to open edit rights to a select group of customers, or to section off a portion of the wiki where customers can contribute their own documentation. Not all wikis support such complex security models. Others say they can support such models, but implementing the security model turns out to be challenging even to technically sophisticated users.
Tables of Contents
Tables of contents are a major avenue for navigating a wiki. Tables of contents provide navigation for multiple headings on a single page, or for a group of pages. Ideally, your wiki provides both.
Sectioning Wiki Content
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Comments and Moderation
A key benefit of wikis is the ability of users to interact with your content, either by modifying it directly or by adding comments. Most wiki platforms support comments, but some require edit access to add comments, potentially opening content modification too broadly. Moreover, the Web is notorious for content that exceeds the bounds of decorum and professionalism. Comment moderation is a key capability for ensuring that the content on your wiki remains professional and projects a positive image of your organization.
Workflow or Approval Process
Most technical writers work in environments where content goes through at least a minimal cycle of review and evaluation before public distribution. This is one area that is weak to non-existent in most wiki software, as “wiki culture” favors more open access and modification rights. The theory in wiki culture is that open modification rights gradually evolve more accurate content. Anyone with more than a passing familiarity with Wikipedia is aware that certain topics have become such notorious battlegrounds that they have locked down and administer carefully. Wikis have so far resisted workflow or approval processes, so you will have to work around this limitation.
Export to .pdf and Online Help Formats
Users often like to print out pages for frequent reference. Some wiki products allow you to create printer-friendly pages, but others provide even more robust options for creating organized manuals as .pdf files.
If you use a wiki for internal collaboration, you may have a need to provide online Help for your user interfaces, in formats such as Microsoft compiled HTMLHelp (.chm format), JavaHelp, the Eclipse Help format, or even plain HTML. For most wiki products, you will likely need to port the content into a Help-authoring tool (HAT) such as RoboHelp, Flare, Doc-to-Help, or Author-IT to output these formats. For one or two tools, plugins or other addons are available that provide the ability to output to online Help formats. These addons often include the ability to output to .pdf as well.
Sidenote: Analytics
Especially when you begin delivering your documentation externally via wiki, some stakeholders in your organization may want to track and report on analytics data. Analytics is not a capability inherent in most wikis, but many can include addons that can plugin to analytics sites, tools, and packages.