I'm with Doc and Henrik. Wikis are great for letting people contribute, but they never have the same feel, IMO, as a polished document. A main reason for that is the primary way wikis work: many voices. I think we need a wiki, or something that makes it just as easy to contribute, but we also need a more formal structure and control for some things, as Henrik says.
Henrik did some great work on a MediaWiki interface for R3 DocBase. I don't remember the details of how it worked, but I still have it here, so we could look at that as a starting point.
I don't know if MediaWiki has per-user page control, but I think wikidot does.
Henrik
The work I did was related to publishing to mediawiki directly from REBOL. This way, some mediawiki pages could be auto-generated.
Gregg
Someone also wrote a makedoc GUI, didn't they? Are there tools like that for managing a doc base? I also agree with some earlier comments about some commercial sites having very good docs. How do they do it?
Henrik
Gabriele wrote a MakeDoc GUI a long time ago.
Gregg
Looks like Gigaspaces uses a wiki, and Confluence is in their footer.
Ah yes, thanks Henrik.
To amend my earlier statements, a wiki as a platform is not the problem. The problem is putting up a wiki and expecting great documentation to appear, without someone to set up a structure, design, and maintain it. You need a leader.
james_nak
Gregg?
Gregg
I can't commit to being the leader just now. I'm happy to help though.
Henrik
I would write the structure as a dialect and sub-page generators from that. Each page would be a plain text file or a set of files which can be separately edited through a simple web interface.
We might have another good alternative option to the wiki (maybe easier and more flexible): use a github repo for all the documentation pages in makedoc format, and have external export batch script to export them in HTML, PDF or whatever format.