using a wiki as your primary authoring tool & delivery mechanism

[Fiona Krycek]

hi there,

I am wondering whether anyone out there has experience using a wiki as their
primary authoring tool and delivery mechanism.

In my real job, I use normal tools like FrameMaker and RoboHelp (or should I
use quotation marks? "normal"? ;) , but I'm doing some volunteer work for a
nonprofit group that is committed to doing everything on a wiki (in part
because there is a huge user base that needs to be able to contribute). As
we go through this process, all sorts of questions are coming up about how
best to make the wiki easily searchable (there's tons of information on it).
There are also questions about whether we even want to push people toward
searching or whether we should be expecting them to use our very lengthy
table of contents, and so on and so forth.

I unfortunately have little experience with wikis. Does anyone else? As my
comments above might indicate, I'm primarily interested in navigation, but
any other guidelines or best practices for doing documentation on a wiki
would be appreciated. We are using MediaWiki software, if that helps.

Thank you so much!
Fiona