Over the last while, I’ve had conversations with other technical communicators about using a wiki for documentation. Many have been interested and enthusiastic about the idea. Others, somewhat frigid.

But a question that a few of them asked was How do I get the documentation out of a wiki? My answer? Don’t worry about it.

The wiki is the delivery method

If you’re putting your documentation on a wiki, you’re doing it for a reason. And that reason is to easily author, manage, maintain, and deliver documentation.

In this case, the wiki is the delivery method. It’s where customers will read and perhaps comment on the documentation. It’s where they’ll be sent when they press F1 or click the Help link in an application. It might even be where they find supplementary information like knowledge base articles and introductory material.

Why would you need to pull the information out of the wiki and put it in another format? The only example I can think of is if you need to baseline the a particular release of the documentation. That can easily be done.

Of course, should you feel the need to export the content on a wiki to another format that, too, can be done. Not all wikis are created equally in that regard, though. Some, like DokuWiki and Confluence, have good export capabilities — ODT (via a plugin) in the case of DokuWiki, and PDF or Word in the case of Confluence. You might want to check WikiMatrix for more information about other wikis.

But, as I said, getting content out of a wiki (especially if you’re using it to deliver documentation) shouldn’t be your biggest concern. That concern should be getting quality content into the wiki.

One thing to remember

My saying this shouldn’t come as a surprise: a wiki isn’t the best tool for all documentation. If you need to reuse content, you can do that (to a limited extent) on a wiki. I discussed this in a previous post, and Sarah Maddox looked at how do this in Confluence.

That said, I’m not entirely convinced that a wiki is the best way in which to write and publish modular documentation that requires you to output to multiple formats or for multiple audiences. The latter can be done — write offline in a tool that supports topic-based authoring, then publish the documentation for various audiences to a namespace on a wiki. If you’re dealing with documentation for multiple audiences (or just multiple products), then the namespace is your friend. You can have individual silos on the wiki for each project and never their twains shall meet.

Thoughts? Experiences? Feel free to leave a comment.

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Related posts:

  1. A few thoughts on writing with a wiki
  2. Baselining documentation on a wiki
  3. Wikis for supplementary documentation

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