Tales from the history of documentation, chapter three

Years came and went and before long the concerns regarding the safety of the computer based documents where addressed. Safe archival systems where created, structures for storing the documents where defined, procedures for when and how to change the documents were made, elaborate software tools for controlling all the defined rules were implemented, template repositories where established to ensure standards for the documents where followed etc.

But the common people didn't use the formal computer based documentation frameworks that much. The complexity of it all was a bit overwhelming, and if you did manage to find something in the huge folder structures, it was properly out of date or wasn't really relevant for the common peoples daily life's.

To improve on this inability of the common people to embrace the electronic documents, documentation support roles were created, more documents were written on how to handle the other documents, people where sent on courses to learn the 'right way', rewards were given to the ones succumbing to the correct document usage, all to ensure that the common people where 'fixed' and finally brought to understand, what was in their best interest.

But even with this massive effort to perfect the documentation system, the common people didn't really use it much. They still preferred to use easier channels of information, which didn't have the complexity of the official documentation system.

Then one day a young enthusiastic fellow approached the community with a new media for communication and maintaining information. A new web based media, where everybody could easily find information and contribute to the documentation if they felt like it, he called it a wiki. He said that the wiki was a major improvement over the conventional document based ways of maintaining information. Information on the wiki was much easier to use, nothing was more than a mouse click or a text search away, and it was much easier kept up-to-date because the modification of the wiki was so easy and everything was changed directly in the central repository.

The experts and managers from the document organization listened to the young man and told him this wiki thing looked very nifty and he was very welcome to use it, but it could of course not be used for the more important information. After all, it wasn't possible to control who changed the documentation, who read the documentation, the documentation was difficult to print on real paper documents. In fact it didn't look at all like real documentation should, it was just a mess of information thrown together by people who didn't understand the finer art of document management.

And of course the primary goal of documents was the ability to store the documentation. When this had been perfected, you could look at the accessibility of the documents. And this issue had already been addressed though the previous efforts to guide the common people towards better understanding of the 'science of documents'.

The young man was pretty disillusioned by this lack of vision from the documentation experts and managers, but agreed to follow the decision to only use the wiki for things considered less important by the experts.

The years passed, and surprisingly enough wikis gradually started to replace the document based structures. Apparently the intangible concept of 'easy to use' and the possibility of everybody to contribute was found to be 'better' by the common people.

And this is where we stand today.

The End.