Core Dump

FLOSS Manuals is a wiki-based tool for creating documentation. It's intended for use with open source projects, but it could easily be used for other things. Janet Swisher has a review on her site.

Flossmanuals.net is based on TWiki, and uses the Xinha WYSIWYG editor for HTML. Because it is a wiki, anyone can create a chapter or a manual, and anyone can edit an existing chapter. However, the maintainer of a manual has control over what changes are ultimately published. I've generally been skeptical of wiki advocates who say, “Oh yeah, and you can create documentation in a wiki, too”, because I've seen very few actual examples. (I've heard that the STC Austin chapter is going to have a presentation about this from someone at Sun, which I'm looking forward to. There's also a group devoted to Wikis for technical documentation at The Content Wrangler Community on Ning.) What's different about the FLOSS Manuals wiki is that it is purpose-built for creating documentation. It's not a case of taking a generic wiki and trying to magically extract documentation from it.

However, a manual on FLOSS Manuals doesn't just live on the wiki. You can take a manual (or a set of chapters selected for your needs), and publish it to HTML or PDF. You can host it on your website, or ship it with your application. You can even “self-publish” it for print-on-demand hard copies through lulu.com. FLOSS Manuals has published a manual for Audacity (audio editing software) this way, and the XO and Sugar manuals will also be available through print-on-demand.

Charles Jeter also writes about it on his blog.

FLOSSManuals.net is a great place to start writing content for developers if you’re just starting out or would like to support a friend’s really cool application. I know of several for-profit companies that put out free widgets of one sort or another that don’t have tech writing staff. This would be perfect for that as well.

The other side of the coin is that it gives a good measure of what’s actually effective. While wiki implementation is challenging, on a cost scale when someone like FLOSSManuals is administrating it, it’s definitely worth exploring.

Labels: software, wikis