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Q&A Best Tool to Create User Guides

For internal documentation I've found wikis to be quite useful. A wiki has several useful features for this task: built-in change-tracking doc can be structured as several pages (e.g. one per ma...

posted 10y ago by Monica Cellio‭  ·  last activity 5y ago by System‭

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#3: Attribution notice added by user avatar System‭ · 2019-12-08T03:33:36Z (almost 5 years ago)
Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/11105
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
#2: Initial revision by (deleted user) · 2019-12-08T03:33:36Z (almost 5 years ago)
For internal documentation I've found wikis to be quite useful. A wiki has several useful features for this task:

- built-in change-tracking
- doc can be structured as several pages (e.g. one per major section) for easier management; individual pages can then be edited without any need to merge changes into a master document
- some (most?) wiki platforms detect impending edit conflicts; if someone else has the page open for edit you'll find out (so no messy merges later)
- can be accessed by anybody with a browser, on any device (try reading a Word doc or PDF on your phone...)
- if your wiki keeps a "recent changes" page, work is visible and thus more likely to receive additional helpful edits or comments (more collaboration)

It does have some disadvantages -- you have to run a server, and printing isn't very practical. If you ever decided to publish the documentation to a wider audience you'd need to port it to something. But, that said, you could probably script most of that.

#1: Imported from external source by user avatar System‭ · 2014-06-05T03:51:25Z (over 10 years ago)
Original score: 12