Subject: Are how-to documents anyone can edit a mad idea?

The how-to guides available in the Lab were started because of two things that are in KnowHow NonProfit's DNA:

1. Listening to people working in smaller not-for-profit organisations, and
2. believing that learning from one another - as well as from experts - is the most effective kind of learning.

From the earliest days of making this site with (we like to think) you, we have heard people generally praise the site content but add that what they often want is a quick set of instructions on how to do a particular task. Some jobs don't need to be understood, they just need to be done.

We knew what was wanted: a set of 'how to do X' articles. We guessed that users would know what it is they want to do (!), so we need a straightforward way of suggesting subjects. And we wanted to find a way of incorporating the experience of users that's better than the standard comment on the end of an article saying 'I did this and found that X is out of date' or 'you forgot to say that you need to have Y before you start'. 

The answer seemed to be a wiki, where anyone can create or edit text. We looked at ehow.com and other similar sites. We talked to people about Wikipedia (the best known wiki) and asked some typical KnowHow users to use it. They were baffled, and intimidated by the 'wiki markup' you need to use. Decided we needed to use a more Word-like editor.

We also have on our team a couple of opinionated people who think they know a lot about effective instructional documents (disclosure: I'm one of them) and they insisted that good procedural documents need to be quite highly-structured and consistent. 

That led us to a highly-mediated wiki, like a form, with embedded editor to allow rich text - lists, photos, etc. We tested our first go at implementing this in an actual usability lab with sample users. They were horrified.

There were two problems. First, we had made the creation/update process so 'directive' with several separate forms that users lost track of what they were doing and the context in which they were doing it. Once we'd seen that, the design response was fairly obvious (the result is the current process).

The other source of user poor reaction was deeper and rather more worrying. If we thought that familiarity with and acceptance of wikis was widespread we were very wrong. 'You mean anyone can edit this? Are you mad?' is a verbatim response from one user. 

Not sure how to respond to this. We've made the process as smooth and reassuring as possible (have we succeeded?) and thought about more issues of authority, traceability, post-hoc mediation than there's room to talk about. Version 2 is in the works with further small improvements. Now it's up to you to try it out and tell us if you think it's useful. And how to tempt in those who think that wikis are mad.