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Subject:Re: wikis vs. blogs From:David Neeley <dbneeley -at- gmail -dot- com> To:techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com Date:Thu, 14 Jan 2010 09:15:09 +0200
John,
First, FYI, I *have* been "paying attention" but your various
questions have been at best somewhat confusing.
WordPress is not itself an "authoring tool"--although it contains a
somewhat rudimentary text editing tool internally as well as the
ability to add graphical content of various kinds.
Your questions seem to infer that you regard WordPress as a
replacement for a Frame or for Word as a content creation tool. While
the end result could easily substitute for documents created in one of
those systems (except hosted online, of course), they are not by any
means otherwise similar.
WordPress is a *publishing platform*. In fact, a huge number of
WordPress users actually compose their content locally and upload it
to their WordPress site(s).
Keep in mind, too, that WordPress is often used as an online content
management system that may not have any blog-like components at all.
There are both stand-alone tools and plugins (such as Sun Weblog
Publisher for OpenOffice.org, for example) for this purpose that make
it rather simple.
It is entirely feasible that you could have both wikis and WordPress
sites and create basic material for both of them on your local
system--although to get the most from a wiki you might have to do a
little tweaking of the wiki code. IIRC, some wikis at least have a
somewhat simplified tagging system that may not be fully compatible
with content destined for a WordPress site--it has simply been too
long since I did any work with wikis to advise you fully on that
point.
In my view, a wiki is great when you have content destined for a
relatively small and discrete audience who can add to the doc with
minimal necessary supervision. As you extend the doc to a larger and
more diverse audience, increasing levels of ongoing editorial
supervision--or more restrictive policies limiting what modifications
others can make without approval--are necessary.
Where there is a company charged with the accuracy of content,
especially a regulated environment, I do not believe a wiki is the
best solution for publication to the general customer base--although
it can be a great in-house collaborative medium for creating
multi-authored docs to begin with. However, for those instances, I
would be seriously looking at Google Wave for the collaborative
authoring part.
A WordPress site, on the other hand, is easier to control while
allowing--or encouraging--easy feedback from users. To me, this fits a
huge number of organizations as a documentation platform (which is why
I suggested it originally).
So-- "from a tools perspective" -- are you more concerned about
*authoring* tools or *publishing* tools? If the first, I believe you
have asked the wrong question.
David
>> On Behalf Of John Posada
>> Sent: Wednesday, January 13, 2010 10:42 AM
>> To: Robert Lauriston
>> Cc: TECHWR-L Writing
>> Subject: Re: wiki vs blog
>>
>> I'm not asking about wikis or blogs...I'm asking, if a company or a
>> department invested in the setup of Word Press, are they going to be
>> excluded from working in one of the mediums or the other....does the
>> tool just not have a particular feature that is vital to one environment
>> and not the other.
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