Building foundations for the crowd: minimalist author support guides for crowdsourced documentation wikis

Abstract

Social help systems are changing the role of professional technical communicators from directly writing documentation to the support of amateurs who write documentation. This paper looks at one genre of social documentation---the crowdsourced documentation wiki---and explores how author support guides on these wikis are constructed. Ultimately, the paper argues that author support guides can be reconceptualized as documentation, and consequently that documentation design theories can be used to improve the construction of these guides. The paper concludes by showing how minimalist documentation design theory can improve the way we support amateur authors on these wikis.