Nelson Ko blogs atWikiConsulting.com

As the launch of Firefox 3 draws close, it is time to reflect on how revolutionary open source has been and how it still has so much to grow into. Being part of the Firefox support team has provided a brand new perspective that brings the open source way of doing things into a non-software arena – namely, providing customer support. The Firefox Support Knowledge Base is a collaborative work of dozens of contributors, the Support Forum is bustling with people answering questions, and Live Chat is manned by dedicated team of community members.

The Firefox Support Knowledge Base that is implemented using TikiWiki has unique features that encourage contribution and at the same time ensure the quality and accurary of the articles. David Tenser, Firefox Support Manager, said this in a recent interview, “Since the Knowledge Base is a wiki, anyone can sign up and make improvements …… we have a pretty neat review system in place to ensure that the accuracy of the articles are maintained. Although anyone can sign up to the wiki and start editing articles, a reviewer must read the changes made and approve them before they’re visible to our users. If a contributor proves to be a good writer whose edits are mostly approved without comments, he or she can become a reviewer as well.”

The Knowledge Base is also a platform for translation of articles, using features in TikiWiki derived from the Cross-Lingual Wiki Engine project of the National Research Council of Canada. The open nature of the wiki provides a lower barrier of entry to begin translating an article. “If an article is not yet available in your language, it’s easy to just get started and translate it yourself, which immediately helps your fellow local Firefox users,” David Tenser remarks.

The most remarkable thing I realized working with Mozilla is its unequivocal support for open source. They are absolutely committed to making sure that any improvements made to the source code of TikiWiki as a result of the Firefox Support project makes it back to that community. One of my main priorities for the next 6 months is to make this process smoother, by encouraging even closer collaboration between members of both communities.

The participatory nature of a wiki makes it extremely suitable for the construction of customer support knowledge bases. But what if you need a support forum as well? The answer is TikiWiki, a wiki with forums built in. Link directly to wiki pages, e.g. ((Safe Mode)), instead of using URLs. Provide single-sign on and an easily maintainable single set of user permissions/groups for support helpers. Leverage the flexibility and customizability of open source to provide a superior support experience for your customers.

For more information on how TikiWiki is used for Firefox Support, see Firefox Support Forum Goes Live. Check out Citadel Rock’s website if you are looking for TikiWiki consulting, integration, and customization.

The support.mozilla.com project currently in beta (powered by TikiWiki) is keeping me busy. But I’m pleased to say that improvements are being made at a healthy pace. It’s always nice to receive thanks and accolades from happy users.

The wiki now has a staging and approval system. Think of it as having pairs of pages that exist in two twinned wikis, a staging wiki where edits can be made by all contributors just like in any regular wiki, and where these changes are committed to the stable wiki (synonymous with approved wiki/definitive wiki) only when someone who is an approver or moderator publishes those changes. This is not a traditional content approval system - the staging wiki is a full wiki in its own right, combining the collaborative authoring benefits a wiki brings with the stability of having reviewed content in the approved wiki.

The overall project is still in early days though, and much more has yet to be done including the implementation of the world’s first(?) really large translation of a knowledge base the wiki way. This is planned to start in January 2008. Yes, I know Wikipedia and other wikis exist in many languages, but this will be different, where the wiki itself is augmented with tools to facilitate the translation process (see wiki-translation.com for more info).