Why Wiki?

The main principle of this wiki is to eliminate bottlenecks in information development by making access to the information completely horizontal: Everyone who has something to say about a given topic is allowed to add, edit or extend the information. This differs greatly from the usual norm where people produce individual documents in isolation and then publish them to the greater community, either via mass emails or some form of file store. The later approach is much less collaborative and collaterally 'blind' as users can not participate in the creation of the information.

Another big difference between using a wiki and more traditional methods is that we offer our work-in-progress material at a much earlier stage. The argument is that since this is a collaborative development effort where many people focus on very similar things so there is a lot of benefit in communicating thoughts even if they are relatively unstructured as there may be others that have something to add.

For further reading Wikipedia has a good article on Wiki

The principle is openness and collaborative development, built on trust. The persons operating on the wiki-site are required to keep a receptive, collaborative, open and respectful approach. A personal introduction into the wiki-environment is crucial, with both philosophical and technical content.

• Collaborative - Very good for collaborative work in early phases of a project where a lot of minds think about the same things in parallel.
• Transparency - Everyone knows where we are all the time!
• Concurrent branching - The Wiki is a 'live document' that enables multiple users to concurrently evolve and recursively branch information.
• Horizontal interface - All users can edit, no need for narrow expert bottlenecks to prep information.
• History trace - All edits are traceable to users and have a history. Tracking changes/updates, who did what, and revisions becomes much easier.
• Access control - Fine-grain user rights and policies are easily controlled: Any combination of None, Read, Edit, Create, Upload, Delete and Admin is possible
• Contextual - Much better context given to information and uploaded files compared to a traditional project file server.
• Collateral visibility - Work-in-progress trails of thought and discussions become much more visible to the community compared to 'blind' email threads.
• Cohesive - All related information exists in the same space and is intimately linked and structured. This is very different from the traditional file-server & email setup where information is much more segregated.
• Speed - All of the above improves efficiency and decreases latency in authoring information and releasing revisions: More users can go through more iterations in less time.
• Flexibility - Dokuwiki, the engine (code) that this wiki runs on is very flexible so it is easy to extend the functionality and add new features when we need them.

Some guidelines to adding and editing wiki content

1. Open your material - The real benefit of a wiki is collaboration so please try to create your material directly in the wiki if you can instead of creating it off-line in Word, Excel, etc.
2. Collaborate! - If you have something to add to a page then please don't be afraid to add or edit; we can always go back to an earlier version of a page if you accidentally brake or delete stuff.
3. Improve - Only edit a page if you think you can improve it.
4. Be respectful - Please refrain from flame-wars and non-constructive criticism. But it is also a bad idea to claim too much ownership over content.
5. KISS Principle - As simple as possible but not simpler. If an article can be simplified in order for it to be easier to understand then please do so.
6. Wikify your text - If one term refers to another then please remember to wikify (adding cross-links) your text
7. Do add content - If you have some thoughts for additions or alterations, or there is something you find vague or don't understand, please add them!
8. Page titles in singular form - This is just better grammatical form. The exception is pages that collect other pages.
9. Do add illustrations - Diagrams and illustrations greatly help understanding and ease communication.
10. Find the right place - The Glossary is the right place for explaining terms and concepts, but further elaborations should be part of the general material.