Wikis, books and open source summits... an interesting combination.  Well... maybe not for everyone, but interesting to me... I'm such a nerd some days.

I'm pulling together my notes on Wiki books, and trying to answer a few questions like:

• Why put a book in a Wiki?
• The problems with books in Wiki format
• Some solutions we've found

I've been asked many times why anyone in their right mind would want to put a book or a manual into a Wiki.  Wikis have a flat disorganized structure.  There is no navigation to lead a reader from one page to the next.  There is no style control, editorial control, no way to print an entire book... and so on.  All very real arguments, but... the other side of the proverbial coin is that traditional book formats are difficult to manage, hard for open source community members to contribute to, and require special software and tooling to edit.  A Wiki provides a convenient, simple cross platform way of doing documentation without the need for any special software except a web browser.  That is a major plus when you are trying to pull together a scattered community of potential contributors.

The real question is, can the limitations of a default Wiki (in this case, MediaWiki) be managed so that the problems are resolved?  I think they can.  We've come up with a few creative solutions to a few of the issues we face with books in Wiki format.

We put the MediaWiki Template feature to good use.  It is amazing what you can do with Templates in MediaWiki.  The major tweak we have done is to use nested templates to generate a Table of Contents.  A Master TOC Template defines the layout, icons, borders, colors and so on.  Each part or chapter in a book gets a TOC template which calls the Master for it's layout, and contains essentially a bulleted list of Wiki pages in the order you want them presented in the book.  Nesting of topics is done with HTML div tagging.  The result is something that actually works quite well.

There are a lot of other features that MedaiWiki has by default that you can use to manage the books... such as sub-pages that can be used to help define the book structure, Watched pages so you can monitor edits, and so on.

There are still some unresolved issues... like, how do you generate PDF and ODF?  How do you monitor community edits across hundreds or even thousands of pages?  How do you define a released document since a Wiki is a "living" document? 

This will be the subject of my little 5 minute presentation on Monday next week (15 October).  Hopefully it'll generate a little interest, and maybe even some controversy and ideas.