ThinkingRock Forum

I'd like to suggest that people take a look at EmacsWiki for an example of how to use a wiki for documenting a extremely large program (namely Emacs!). It was begun by one person (Alex Schroeder) from basically an outline of all the things related to Emacs that could be covered in the wiki. As he continually added to the wiki and refactored the pages, it eventually achieved "critical mass" and became a useful reference to many other Emacs users who then added their own interests about Emacs to the wiki.

My personal thinking about developing a wiki is the following tips:

• Don't get fancy -- make pages pages plain, but full of text. This is important in order to make the wiki useful across all browsers (no matter the screen size).
• Don't use a sidebar for navigation -- it makes it more difficult to refactor and it splits a user's concentration on the documentation. Keeping the "Table of Contents" in the document makes it one interface for going to another place (click on the link in the document).
• Don't use fancy fonts beyond the usual bold and italic. Special fonts make it difficult for a sight-challenged user to resize the page in a reasonable way.