Wiki As Build Component

In my experience, the more a development team gets to use and appreciate Wiki, the more they want to use the power of Wiki in areas outside knowledge management. The question is: is this good idea? And if it is a good idea, how can Wiki be used best in this capacity?

Using Wiki as an input to the build

It may be tempting to use Wiki to store information needed by the build that needs to change often, be easy to edit, and be edited by different professions (not just developers).

This depends on using a Wiki with strong export features.

Keep docs in the Wiki and pull the doc pages out to put in the build.
Keep configuration information on the Wiki and use it to configure a build task.

Using Wiki to display build output

This is less common (usually you can just put the output on a Web server and make a link to it on the Wiki), but if you have a Wiki with strong programmability, you can give users the ability to create ad-hoc views of the output data by creating/editing Wiki pages.

CategoryWiki