Collaborative vs. Topic-Based Authoring

协作与基于主题的创作

2021-07-21 23:00 clickhelp

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Many working environments demand collaborative writing and editing of documents. Nowadays, such collaborations are simplified. The participants don’t need to be co-located and work from the same office; they are free to reside in different geographic locations. In addition, documents are quickly and efficiently distributed through emails, phones, and chat or conferencing tools that let people gather without having to attend the office together. Today we’ll consider two approaches to content creation: collaborative authoring and topic-based authoring, and see their strategies. What Is Collaborative Authoring? Collaborative authoring is a method of creating content with the help of several authors. With such a flexible process, the content can be created more quickly and with better quality. It involves using a web-based tool to create a document so that multiple members of a group can edit the document. Collaborative Authoring Approaches When you have several authors, you can apply several strategies, like: Parallel. Each author is in charge of certain parts of the content and creates their portion simultaneously with the others. After all parts are done, the content is united to create the complete document. Responsive. Each author is in charge of certain parts of the content. As they create their content, they modify the content taking into account what was created by other authors. Sequential. Each author is in charge of certain parts of the content and creates their portion after the previous author has completed theirs. As you may see, an individual author works on their portion of content in each of these approaches. With such working practice, each author can become a bottleneck and be a point of failure for the process. For example, one author can miss the deadline with the content handover, and others won’t be able to proceed with their part. To avoid that situation, you can apply a mixed approach where authors can work on any part of the document in parallel to other authors and provide a flexible process. Collaborative Authoring Pros and Cons The apparent advantages of collaborative writing are: Content quality. When you have a team of writers, the skillset available to contribute to the content production broadens. Multiple authors can assess each other’s work and improve its quality. Adaptability. The documentation creation process often demands a lot of resources. With collaborative authoring, you can involve additional writers in the process to meet the increased demand. A team with a broad skill set can address a wider range of topics and tasks. Flexibility. Content is often just a part of a broader system, for example, product development. That’s why content production may be overlooked as a bottleneck for the system as a whole. Collaborative authoring provides flexibility to the content creation process and mitigates this risk. Efficient workflow. With collaborative authoring, you can create an organized workflow with other authors. Everyone will see changes right away, so it provides more transparency around what is being worked on, and no one will be doing duplicate work. Accessibility. All your work is stored in the cloud, so you can access it from anywhere and don’t need to worry about hard drives crashing or running out of storage. You can also log into your authoring tool from any browser, so you aren’t tied to your primary desktop computer in the office. With the benefits of collaborative authoring, there come the following challenges: Consistency. Contradictory content leads to misinterpretations, and in automated environments, it can lead to production issues. And since every writer has its style, collaborative authoring teams need to control the style used to ensure that quality and consistency are maintained. Uniformity. All team members must understand the common goal and pull in the same direction to ensure that the final objective is achieved. Implementing new tools. The collective work with content demands new tools and methods for its control and ease of use. That’s when we hit on the idea of a different approach, and the time is ripe for topic-based authoring. What Is Topic-Based Authoring? Topic-based authoring is an approach to producing content that is divided into small blocks of information - topics. A topic is a unit of information with a title and content, short enough to be specific to a single subject. These topics can be mixed and reused in different contexts, and the user could read them in any order and may skip around to different topics, as needed. The topic-based approach is especially suitable for technical documentation. Topic Types With topic-based writing, you can create three different kinds of content, each provides a different type of information for users: Tasks: Tell them how to accomplish their goals. It provides detailed steps to perform that task and would include pre- and post-requisites, some context about that goal or task, choices, and/or results. Concepts: Explain how things work or what things mean. Concepts give them a way to understand how things fit together. Concepts often include graphics that explain or illustrate, such as an architectural diagram with high-level information. (Glossary terms are a sub-type of a concept topic). References: Quick look up information with lots of detail. These might include very technical graphics, organized lists, and detailed tables. Reference topics are meant for scanning, not reading. Topic-Based Authoring Pros and Cons Technical writers are familiar with topic-based authoring. Topic-based authoring has the following advantages: Сoherence. Structured topics contain only the information needed to understand one concept, perform one procedure, or look up one set of reference information. Re-usability. Topics can be reused multiple times. This is one of the main benefits of topic-based authoring; it means you can write a topic once and then use it in many publications, such as new products, new releases, etc. Ease of update. It is easier to manage and translate topics, and you can reuse them in different publications. Сost effectiveness. It is more profitable to make updates to existing documents than create new ones. Speed. Updates are made faster: when you change a topic, the changes apply wherever that topic is used. Accessibility. Access to specific information is faster since you don’t need to go through the whole document to find the subject you need. Flexibility. It means that topics may be used in multiple formats across multiple outputs, such as print and online, via large desktop displays, tablets, smartphones, etc. The question arises: If topic-based authoring is so great, why aren’t all companies implement it? Here are a few thoughts: Investment costs to implement changes. This is additional software that demands budgeting. Not all companies understand its benefits; therefore, they may be reluctant. All it takes is to look at ROI and consider the time it saves and the quality it increases. After that, any company will see that topic-based authoring tools are worth the efforts. People are the most expensive asset in any organization. Productivity increase is a desirable and logical thing economic-wise. For example, you have four people working with documentation, and you’re willing to hire the fifth one. Just calculate the year’s salary of that additional person and compare the number with the price of a topic-based authoring software; take ClickHelp, for instance, and you’ll see that it is less costly to buy the worthy tool. Changes themselves. Before switching to topic-based authoring, you must change the review process and adapt existing content to a topic-based model. Authors should vary their writing habits and start thinking structurally. Not everyone is ready to do that. It takes time and the willingness to leave the shell and start working differently. So this restriction is only in the heads and it can be mastered by training. Conclusion When you’re writing tech documentation and cumulating a lot of content, the topic-based authoring approach fits you best. Short topics are preferable to longer chapters or documents since they are easier to read and comprehend. This approach is implemented in ClickHelp, so the documentation is done simpler and faster with features like reusable snippets and variables for repeated pieces of content to provide users with highly focused search results. Learning to use this solution is easy. The complexity may be hidden in changing how you write or define specifications for your topics. But if applied thoroughly, topic-based authoring offers the ability to keep your content updated for almost any format. So take a close look at topic-based authoring if, for some reason, you haven’t done it yet. Good luck with your technical writing! ClickHelp Team Author, host and deliver documentation across platforms and devices
许多工作环境要求协作编写和编辑文档。如今,这种合作已经得到简化。员工不需要在同一地点,在同一办公室工作;员工可以自由住在在不同的地理位置。此外,文档通过电子邮件、电话、聊天或会议工具快速高效地分发,人们无需一起去办公室就可以聚集在一起。 今天,我们将有两种创建内容的方法:协作创作和基于主题的创作,还能看到这两种方法的策略。 协作创作是什么? 协作创作是一种在一些作者的协助下创建内容的方法。有了这样一个灵活的过程,创建内容就可以更快、质量更好。这个方法涉及使用基于web的工具创建文档,以便组的多个成员可以编辑文档。 协同创作方法 当您有多个作者一起工作时,可以应用多种策略,例如: 平行结构。每个作者负责内容的某些部分,并与其他作者同时创建自己的部分。所有部分完成后,内容将合并以创建完整的文档。 反应敏捷的每个作者负责内容的某些部分。在创建内容时,他们会根据其他作者创建的内容修改内容。 顺序性。每个作者负责内某些部分的内容,并在前一个作者完成其的部分后再创建这些作者自己的部分。 有了这样的工作实践,每个作者都会成为这个过程的瓶颈和失败点。例如,作者可能会错过提交内容的截止期限,而其他人将无法继续执行他们的部分。为了避免这种情况,您可以应用一种混合方法,其中作者可以与其他作者并行处理文档的任何部分,并提供一个灵活的过程。 协作创作的利弊 合作写作的显著的优点是: 内容质量。当您有一个作家团队时,可用于为内容制作做出贡献的技能集就会扩大。多个作者可以评估彼此的作品并提高其质量。 适应性。文档创建过程通常需要大量资源。通过协作创作,您可以在过程中加入更多的作者,以满足不断增加的需求。拥有广泛技能集的团队可以处理更广泛的主题和任务。 具有高度的灵活性。内容通常只是一个更广泛的系统的一部分,比如产品开发。这就是为什么内容生产可能会被视为整个系统的瓶颈。协作创作提供了灵活性,并降低了内容创建过程中的此类风险。 高效的工作流。通过协作创作,您可以与其他作者一起创建有组织的工作流。每个人都会立即看到变化,因此它为正在进行的工作提供了更多的透明度,没有人会做重复的工作。 可访问性。您的所有工作都存储在云中,因此您可以从任何地方访问它,并且不必担心硬盘崩溃或存储空间耗尽。您也可以从任何浏览器登录到创作工具中,因此您不会与办公室中的主台式电脑绑定。 除了协作创造的好处,出现了以下挑战: 均匀性。矛盾的内容会导致误解,在自动化环境中,会导致生产问题。由于每个作者都有自己的风格,协作创意团队需要控制用来确保质量和一致性的风格。 均匀性。所有团队成员必须理解共同目标,并朝着同一方向工作,以确保实现最终的目标 使用新的工具。使用内容的集体工作需要新的工具和方法来控制内容并易读。 此时,我们想到了不同的方法,基于主题的创作时机已经成熟。 什么是基于主题的创作? 基于主题的创作是一种生成内容的方法,它被分为一小部分信息主题。主题是一个信息单元,其标题和内容足够短到特定于主题。这些主题可以在不同的上下文中混合和重用,用户可以按任何顺序读取它们,或者根据需要跳转到不同的主题。基于主题的方法特别适用于技术文件。 主题类型 您可以根据三种不同类型的内容来创建不同类型的内容: 任务:告诉他们如何实现目标。它提供了执行任务的详细步骤,并将包括先决条件和先决条件、有关目标或任务的一些上下文、选择和/或结果。 概念:解释事物如何工作或事物的意义。概念为他们提供了一种理解事物是如何结合起来的方法。概念通常包括解释性或说明性图形,例如具有高级信息的体系结构图(术语表术语是概念主题的子类型)。 参考资料:快速查找带有大量细节的信息。这些图形可能包括非常具有技术性的图形、有组织的列表和详细的表。参考主题是用于扫描的,而不是用来阅读的。 基于主题的创作利弊 技术作者熟悉基于主题的创建。基于主题的创作具有以下好处: 协调。结构化主题只包含理解一个概念、执行一个过程或查找一组参考信息所需的信息。 可重复使用性。主题可以多次重复使用。这是基于主题的创作的主要好处之一;这意味着你可以写一个主题一次,然后在许多出版物中使用它,如新产品、新版本等。 易于更新。管理和翻译主题更容易,您可以在不同的出版物中重用它们。 经费有效性。更新现有文档比创建新文档更能节省成本 速度更新速度更快:当您更改主题时,更改将应用于使用该主题的任何位置。 可访问性。访问特定信息的速度更快,因为您不需要浏览整个文档就可以找到所需的主题。 具有高度的灵活性。这意味着主题可以通过大型桌面显示器、平板电脑、智能手机等以多种格式使用,如打印和在线。 问题来了:如果基于主题的创作如此伟大,为什么不是所有的公司都实现它?以下是一些想法: 变更需的投资成本。这是一个需要编制预算的附加软件。并不是所有的公司都直到这个软件的好处;因此,公司可能很不情愿。公司所需要的就是看看投资回报率,考虑一下这个软件节省的时间和它增加的质量。之后,任何公司都会发现基于主题的创作工具是值得尝试的。人员是任何组织中最昂贵的资产。就经济角度而言,提高生产力是一件可取的和合乎逻辑的事情。例如,您有四个人在使用文档,并且您愿意雇佣第五个人。只要计算该额外人员的年薪,并将数字与基于主题的创作软件的价格进行比较;例如,单击帮助,您会发现购买有价值的工具更便宜。 改变自己。在切换到基于主题的创作之前,必须更改审阅过程,并使现有内容适应基于主题的模型。作者应该改变写作习惯,从结构上思考问题。不是每个人都准备好这么做。这需要时间和意愿离开外壳,开始不同的工作。所以这种限制只存在于大脑中,可以通过训练来掌握。 结论 当您编写技术文档并积累下了大量内容,基于主题的创作方法最适合您。与较长的章节或文件相比,短小精悍的主题更容易阅读和理解。这种方法是在ClickHelp中实现的,因此文档编写更简单、更快,并具有可重复利用的片段和重复内容的变量等特性,为用户提供高度集中的搜索结果。学习使用这个解决方案很容易。这种复杂性可能隐藏在如何为主题编写或定义规范中。但是,如果应用彻底,基于主题的创作提供了一种能力,让您的内容更新几乎任何格式。因此,如果出于某种原因,您还没有完成基于主题的创作,请仔细研究一下。 祝你的技术写作好运! 单击帮助小组 跨平台和设备编写、托管和交付文档

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