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Above in this comment thread: Wikis for technical documentation, one writer's story » DITA-MediaWiki

Yes, a DITA wiki combo - or perhaps conversion?

Posted by Anne Gentle at 2007-04-26 11:17

Absolutely, Steve. DITA is an XML-based architecture for authoring, producing, and delivering technical information. DITA's XML prescribes writing concepts, tasks, or reference information in a structured way. I posted about DITA and wikis in Dec. 2005 (http://talk.bmc.com/blogs/blog-gentle/anne-gentle/dita-wiki/), and wasn't the first to think about such a combo (preceded by Paul Prescod at XMetal and Scott Abel of The Content Wrangler). And since then I have even seen that people are looking for a DITA to MediaWiki transform. Wiki markup is
so simple, it seems that a transform could make quick work of most
DITA topics. A quick search on the dita-ot-developer list on
sourceforge.net revealed that Deborah Pickett was writing such a thing
for her employer last April... see this post:
http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/message.php?msg_id=15496569.

All that to say, the idea has legs (hey, that keeps with an evolution theme). I agree that search is the way most people find information, and structured content can assist in searching and authoring and navigaton and... unifying the "chaos" of wikis with the structure of XML-based doc.

Thanks for a good reminder of how great wikis are for everyday communication internally, too.