tekom-Jahrestagung 2012 - ActiveDoc

User Assistance
How can we transport the concepts of structured authoring to a wiki?
Why should we do so? Are wikis made for structured authoring?
Adopting some concepts of structured authoring for collaborative writing
in a wiki may be well suited for companies who wish to organize
their writing processes more strictly and to improve user experience for
wiki readers. A wiki is a good documentation tool especially for those
companies who:
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Need to document internal software or processes
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Want to involve subject matter experts and software engineers in
the writing process while keeping documentation structure and style
consistent
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Want to provide an online documentation and use the commenting or
collaboration functions of a wiki in order to get feedback from their
users
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Do not want to establish an XML writing environment
Metadata is the key
Using Forms and
Templates
Adding CMS Functionality to a Wiki
There are different approaches for realizing CMS functionality in a
wiki. The approach that you use depends on your requirements and
on your wiki software. This session shows examples from a showcase
implemented in Semantic MediaWiki, an open-source extension to
MediaWiki (http://semantic-mediawiki.org/). For other wiki software,
such as Confluence, you have to use appropriate plugins or extensions,
such as Scroll Versions from k15t (http://www.k15t.com/display/en/
Scroll-Versions).
In a Semantic MediaWiki, you can use metadata to add structure to your
wiki. This metadata provides, for example:
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Index keywords
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Information on the target group
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Workflow information: status, responsible person, priority
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Region and language of the article
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Information about the position of the topic in the topic hierarchy
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Relations to other topics, e.g. from a task topic to the associated reference
information
How to motivate users to keep to a defined topic structure, create DITAsimilar
topic types and assign the correct metadata? The answer is: Use
forms! You may, for example, provide different forms for typical DITA
topic types, such as task, reference, and concept.
Forms ensure that users cannot enter text outside the predefined fields.
The layout is rendered automatically as forms are linked with templates.
Default text within the fields guides the users and tells them which content
to enter in specific fields.
tekom-Jahrestagung 2012
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