Community-Driven Documentation for Free Software?

const_k asks: "I'm maintaining TightVNC, a popular free software project. As with many other free and open source projects, there is a problem with having comprehensive documentation. Currently, I'm thinking about launching a sort of community-driven documentation project, using Wiki as an engine that would help volunteer contributors to write and improve the documentation. I'd like to know, is it a good idea to use Wiki, and is it possible to achieve decent documentation quality this way? What software and technologies other free or open source software projects use, and what are the results, in terms of completeness and quality of the documentation? Any pointers and suggestions would be greatly appreciated."

Comments

LFS

[GreyWolf3000]

The Linux From Scratch book has a cvs system in place, and automatically converts to html, xml, txt, ext from the sources (which are TeX now iirc).

But Seriously

[McCarrum]

I've found running TikiWiki to be fantastic. Running under the usual LAMP system, it does much more than the atypical wiki; forums, trackers, faq's, dynamic content, image and file galleries, etc etc etc.

I've been using it for building a knowledge base, and all the extras have just been the icing on the cake. Two thumbs up.

Not a good idea

[t_hunger]

I don't think the idea of community driven documentation is all that good. You wrote the program, you know how it works, so please document it! Users are great in pointing out areas you will need to improve, but they are not terrible good at writing the documentation in the first place: They don't know how your program works, so they have to guess (=> inaccurate documentation) or read and understand the code (=> usually start to develop themselves, forgetting about the documentation;-)

About a Wiki: Those tend to work rather well, contrary to what other people here claim. You need to monitor them regularly and frequently to catch all those changes by idiots that need to proof that a wiki is not secure (what a surprise! It's *editable webpages*, of course it is not!). That happens about once a month in our wiki or about 2000 times a day after being mentioned on slashdot (no, I won't give the URL here;-). Luckily most of those people are too stupid to da any real damage.

Anyway: I'd go for some annotation system like the one used by PHP and other projects where you have a fixed documantation text and users may add notes, ideas and questions to the static pages.