Blender User Manual Analysis

Explored Systems

MediaWiki

Advantages

• Users can edit it online quickly.
• History of changes on a specific page is easily accessible.

Disadvantages

• No review process - anyone can edit it with false information or low quality writing.
• Difficult to restructure, move large sections around.

Sphinx

Advantages

• Can use Git/SVN to track changes and plug into a review platform (e.g. Phabricator).
• Each writer has the full file structure locally, allowing for batch-editing like find & replace.

Disadvantages

• Very technical setup - artists don’t want to spend 30 mins getting source, installing deps, and figuring out how to build before they can edit anything (leads to low number of contributors).

Ideal System

• Easy to edit - does not require any complicated setup (encourages for writers).
• Fun to edit - make it somehow enjoyable or rewarding, encourage people to keep writing.
• Connected to review platform - to make sure contributions are not bad.
• Ability to batch-edit - sometimes you need to change little things in many pages at once.