WritersUA has opened registration for the Fifteenth Annual WritersUA Conference! Visit the site to see the program, speaker bios, exhibitors list, travel information, and fun and games.

The program looks really good, with a nice blend of technology, design, and tool information. Predominant sessions include DITA, XML, and wikis, along with tool-based sessions on AuthorIT, Doc-To-Help, Flare, FrameMaker, and RoboHelp.

I'll be presenting two sessions: Implementing Accessible Web Design (with Brian Walker) and Innovations in Help Authoring Tools.

Hope to see you there!

[modified shortly after posting]

Continuing our wiki discussion...

I've set up two wikis: MSHelpWiki (a community wiki for anyone authoring Microsoft Help) and WikiWackyWorld (a community wiki for those who purchase the book, although it isn't open to the public just yet). And I'm in the process of creating a conference session on wikis that will include demos and more.

A discussion taking place on different email lists lately is using wikis for documentation, and how it should be set up. After all, by their nature, wikis can be edited by anyone. However, some sites are set up so that the folks on the documentation team are the only ones who can edit (see the Adobe Source Library (ASL) wiki for one example). Others are set up similarly to how the MSHelpWiki and WikiWackyWorld wikis have been set up: as community wikis around a common theme, where anyone can edit.

So I thought it was interesting to find out that WebWorks has set up a wiki for "helpful information" for the ePublisher platform at http://wiki.webworks.com. The site is still being worked on...the design has changed from last week a bit, and I like the latest layout better.

What's interesting is that no one seems to have the rights to any of the material that's posted. (As a comparison, many documentation wikis use the GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL) or Open Publication License.)