So, I'm wondering if anybody out there is providing help texts as wikis. This is a lazy way of building documentation, and certainly one way of building a community of application users, especially if the wiki is central and web based. You might need some partitioning to allow individual clients to have their own specific areas in the wiki, or a subwiki delivered with the application, hosted on their own intranet.

I'm of the opinion that you need both ... you need authoritative documentation that says how the software is supposed to work -- if for no other reason then that it gives you a refrence point for evaluating bugs.

But there is also a big advantage to having a place where your users can suply tips, tricks, caveats, and gotchas based on their own experience. Once upon a time this was handled with things like FAQs, then FAQ-O-Matic put more power in the users hands, and then Wiki's sprung up.

I remember about 5 yeras ago when i got sucked into doing some PHP work with some friends. I remember loathing the language, but loving the documentation, becuase even though the PHP version of "perlfunc" wasn't as thorough as perlfunc, every function had user annotations. Since then MySql has started allowing similar anotations

The problem with both of those now a days, is that there is a lot of cruft, and all people can do is "vote" for or against a single comment, not tweak it to make it better. so sometimes people wind up with an overwellming amount of comments to sift through.

I think the ideal situation is online documentation, in which every section/page has an "authoritative" block of text/diagrams that is fixed in stone and only editable by your TechWriters. and a "User Additions" section that is a true wiki, where naybody can tweak/modify/add. The key is, that as new versions of your software comes out, and your tech writers write new documents, they should review what people wrote about hte old version in the wiki, and incorperate things that are still applicable into the new documentation