Clever Title: Owen Allen's ramblings

The lead for Sun xVM Ops Center documentation recently announced that wikis.sun.com would be the primary source for documentation. Shortly thereafter, a number of people replied, saying that they felt wikis were inferior sources for documents compared to docs.sun.com. I think that, as a company, we haven't really talked about the merits of various document sources.

There are certainly some problems with wikis.sun.com. The PDF functionality is wonky, there's no unified style, and the index function is next to useless. These are serious issues. However, they're all technical issues. They're all things that can be fixed with some under-the-hood changes at wikis.sun.com.

However, Bigadmin, docs.sun.com, and our myriad other document sources have their own problems. They're extremely difficult to edit, since changes must be made by the sites' respective admins, and they're often difficult to navigate. Those are serious issues, too. The difference is that those problems are inherent.

The Sun xVM Ops Center team (myself included) have been working on our wiki for months now, adding new content as it becomes available, responding to questions, and correcting errors. Meanwhile, this week, the project lead requested a change to our BigAdmin site, and was told that it will have to wait until next week because one of the admins is on vacation.

If people feel that the quality of the wiki is not good enough, then perhaps we need a better method for editing. If they feel that the technical side needs some improvement, then perhaps we need to devote more attention to their structure. But I think that, despite these issues, wikis are the best platform that we have, and that they have more room for improvement than our other platforms as well.