But can a wiki make for a good user support tool?
I recently stumbled upon a wiki that attempts to fill this role: wiki.webworks.com
I like the idea, but I see an issue with this particular implementation. First, this wiki is open to the user community at large, allowing them to contribute content as they see fit. As a result, the wiki states the following disclaimers:
The contents of the wiki portion of the site are fully editable by anyone. As a consequence of this, Quadralay cannot ensure the accuracy of its content at any given point in time, and has limited control over what content is posted by users. You acknowledge that Quadralay is not responsible for the operation of or content located on or through the wiki siteand:
All projects, code snippets, suggestions presented in this medium are colloborative materials expressed by both Quadralay personnel and WebWorks power users. Material taken from this medium and implemented into your existing production workflow or testing environments should be carefully considered and is done at your own risk. Although our product support consultants can and will place material on this medium to faciliate collaboration between Quadralay and its customers, Support Incidents submitted through webworks.com regarding issues with implementation of this material will not be accepted. Support for the implementations expressed here will only be supported through this medium.If the intent is to supply users with a means of online support/reference, I think it would be best to triage the contributed content, have it validated by a company representative, and then published. Otherwise, the "use at own risk" content might best be left untouched. Now, this is no different than people sharing tips and tricks on WWP-Users or any other user community, but this wiki is run and branded by Quadralay. I'd think they would want to control the content to ensure it's technically correct. And yet, I can understand their position, as it's a daunting job to track and validate all contributed content.
I did attempt to use the wiki to find clues that might lead to an answer to a question that was posted to WWP-Users, but the search result was, well, interesting. The resulting page was a long list of random quotes and was titled "fortune cookie". I think there might still be some test content up there, so YMMV in the short term when searching the wiki for information.
I invite you to take a look at this wiki and think about this medium as a means of customer support. Are there pros or cons that come to mind? Do you use a wiki to support your customers? And if so, how has it worked for you and your company? Please share your thoughts in a comment!
Update:
Char James-Tanny came across the wiki and blogged it about a week ago, and Sarah O'Keefe has posted about it today in her blog. Some good questions have been raised, particularly regarding ownership of information/code shared in the wiki (is itQuadralay's content or the poster's content?), support for the information therein, and use of the wiki as an alternative to user documentation.
This last one intrigues me. If WWeP is shipping with minimal documentation, and users are expected to go to the wiki to learn about the product, how can a company get away with not supporting the information? Or to phrase it differently, SHOULD they get away with not supporting the information?
This does indeed appear to be an interesting situation. Have you purchased WWeP? Do you use the wiki for product information? Have you run into support issues as a result?
4 comments:
Quadralay should make an effort to provide complete documentation with their product and not rely solely on the community to do so. Indeed, Quadralay should produce documentation that is a shining example of what their product can do, since their product is used by *technical writers.* I find it disappointing that, over the years, Quadralay's documentation has not gotten better.
Ownership is another issue. The Web increasingly becomes about someone making money off something, usually not their own thing. I'm not surprised Quadralay does not clarify ownership of content, at some point perhaps they want to make a dollar off it ....
Question: why is the Wiki a more useful format than the WWP-Users Yahoo Group?
Cheers.
I agree with anon about the documentation — if WebWorks were open-source, user-written documentation & user-driven support would be a proper quid pro quo. But this isn't the case here. Cheap. Cheap. Cheap.
In general, I think a wiki is a good way to help enable users to build a community and help each other, though. Quadralay has apparently seeded the wiki with some starter content, which helps. The thing is, you need a critical mass of users to really get a wiki to take off, and it's hard to build that critical mass starting from a minimal amount of already-useful content — so they pretty much need to seed the wiki to get the ball rolling.
Compared to user forums, the flat (or minimal) hierarchy of a wiki lends itself to searching for information — how many of us look for info past the second page or so in older forum threads? Yet a forum is familiar to most people, and they know how to contribute to one already. Personally, I think wikis are a great tool, and tech writers in particular should be jumping on them. A seriously gutsy move for some company would be to provide a complete set of documentation, loaded into their wiki for everyone out there to comment on or even improve — it would be an instant way to see what needs to be expanded on or fixed.
Farfetched. If Q were to provide a complete set of documentation with useful content loaded into their wiki:
1) Beers're on me.
2) I'll sing (okay, chant) their praises from the highest tower.
Cheers.
I thought Quadralay had finally come out of the woods with these last few good releases. Now they're back to their old ways. That's the ultimate outsourcing of documentation, which is a slap in the face to their target audience -- writers! How boneheaded can you get?
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