Peter Williams

I have been using wikis¹ for quite a while now. So long in fact that I had forgotten exactly how much better they are than the alternatives. I started my new job a few weeks ago and started evangelizing the wiki that had recently been installed. Last week the developer who sits next to me wrote up a bunch of notes about the current iteration in the wiki. After just an hour or so of using it she was totally convinced. It reminded me of how I felt the first time I used a wiki.

The low barrier of entry makes continuous documentation² tenable. Prior to the wiki we were using Sharepoint, which as far as I can tell, goes out of it’s way to make documenting things as difficult as possible. Already there are things documented in the wiki that would never have been documented in Sharepoint because Sharepoint is just too painful. If your group does not already have a wiki you should set one up³. Today. You will be glad you did.

1. Is this the plural form of wiki? Or is it wiki?

2. Trying to create documentation after the fact never really works because there is never enough time near the release date and documentation always gets squeezed first. After all, if the program does not work it does not matter how good the documentation is.

3. We use TWiki and it works great.