October 27, 2005
It's Time to Emancipate Computer Help Documentation
This post is spurred by the latest sigmac-talk mailing list thread about printing to Wade.
For months now, Apple users at Case have griped about not being able to print to Wade using OS X 10.4 Tiger. The issue was first raised with optimism. The thread chronicles guarantees of the posting of the updated instructions on help.case.edu. However, those instructions were never posted and people are still having trouble.
The solution to the problem: The Case Wiki (see printing for our developing solution for this particular problem). 95% of help.case.edu is instructions and reference material. Although the material is well laid-out and easy-to-follow, there is one major problem: accessibility. As our chronicles with printing to Wade from Tiger have shown us, the site is not frequently updated and it is difficult to push through updates.
The information published at help.case.edu is ripe for wikification. It makes perfect sense to convert ALL of the reference information located there to the Case Wiki. When ITS changes something, why should they have to go through a middleman to make changes to the (un)official instructions at help.case.edu? Shouldn't they have access to the documentation for their own projects and services? Shouldn't they be able to change the instructions at the exact same time a change in a service is made?
By publishing this material on a wiki, we would also open up a conduit of communication between system operators and end-users. End-users could comment on the instructions, express issues using the instructions, and, of course, modify the instructions to make them easier to follow.
Converting content over to the wiki is no small task. There are countless pages of content and numerous images. However, the end result is worth the trouble, as it is for the benefit of the end-user, which is, after all, the pillar on which customer support and the Help Desk rest.
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