Comments on: A Social Media Wiki for Birmingham?

By: Julia Gilbert

Julia Gilbert — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 09:40:04 +0000

I wish I had the time to commit to something like this as I have several years experience of technical writing and editing. Unfortunately as I do this full time, I’m reluctant to dedicate large chunks of my free time to it.

Having said that, I’ll help out as and when I can. If someone is appointed overall editor (as I would strongly advise), I’d be happy to have a chat with them about the intricacies and potential pitfalls of technical/instructional writing.

I’d also advise that you refer to the Plain English Campaign http://www.plainenglish.co.uk/ and also John Kirkman’s books “Good Style” and “Punctuation Matters”.

By: Pete Ashton

Pete Ashton — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 22:47:16 +0000

@Si - I like that reference / rough guide model.

@bounder - I’m intrigued by this XWiki thing http://www.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Main/WebHome which was introduced to me by a random guy at the Moseley Quiz on Monday. Bits of it look dead techy but check out the links at the top. You can download each page as a PDF or RTF file. Nice. Haven’t gotten around to installing it yet though.

By: Jon Bounds

Jon Bounds — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 19:51:15 +0000

>As for the general thoughts about wikis I’m not sure this is a huge issue as I’d imagine the text will be pretty static most of the time.

I’d be tempted to write a wiki, but not present as one? MediaWiki is ugly and off-putting to the casual viewer, navigation is a problem — it’s the only wiki system I’ve used tho’, I’m guessing there are better alternatives? I bet there’s a WP plugin to wiki-ize it somewhere.

By: Si

Si — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 18:42:07 +0000

I can see a lot of value in this one. Especially for organisations that are highly motivated to get with the social media but lack the experience.

This sounds like a cross between an O’Reilly Reference and a Rough Guide - the fickle technical pointers balanced by a essential guide to the social mores.

As you say, a happy side-effect will be the extraction of knowledge and pooling of best practice

By: Pete Ashton

Pete Ashton — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 16:41:03 +0000

Good point. I’d hope that by having the initial document written by a core team working to a style guide those issues would be minimised. Once it’s opened up I wouldn’t imagine most people will be writing whole pages. They’ll just be adding updates and links and do so in the style of the existing text.

As for the general thoughts about wikis I’m not sure this is a huge issue as I’d imagine the text will be pretty static most of the time. Edits will be infrequent compared to Wikipedia so maintaining a readability shouldn’t be a problem.

By: Jon Bounds

Jon Bounds — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 15:55:18 +0000

Love the idea, but worry about the end product a little – specifically who it’s aimed at. Is it us social media types, council bodies, anyone? All very different writing styles, and the “translation” involved between them might prove as hard as to write again from scratch.

For me wiki’s don’t work well as a readable guide, they’re very “dip-in” — for the uninitiated it might not be a great format to use.

I could see a really structured tutorial guide working really well — if there was some kind of Torah-style “notes in the margin” thing going on too all so much the better.