In a previous post, I discussed moving a large piece of documentation from Word to a wiki. That got me thinking about how to reuse content on the wiki — there is some potential for reuse in the documentation. It turns out that TWiki (the wiki that’s used here) enables you to do just that.
How? With the %INCLUDE{...}% variable. This variable mimics text insets in FrameMaker. You have the content that you want to reuse in a topic on the wiki, and then place the %INCLUDE{..}% variable in the topic in which you want the content to appear.
You’re not limited to content on your wiki, either. You can point to files on a server or Web pages. And you can make the include as granular as you want — down to the section, paragraph, phrase, or even word level. Although I don’t see the point in the latter …
Last weekend, I was reading Sarah Maddox’s blog, and she mentioned how this is done in Confluence — a solution that’s a lot more elegant than the similar feature in the other wikis that I’ve used. In Confluence, you can have an inclusions library. Sarah explains this in more detail in her post.
Overall, What’s your experience with reusing content on a wiki? Feel free to leave a comment.