Why do it this way?
Speaking from long experience as a professional technical writer: It is usually hard, even exhausting, to deliver and maintain documentation projects.
This is partly because such projects don’t scale well, given the inherent complexity and the typical tools and processes that are in use:
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'More collaborators' doesn’t always equate to 'faster and better progress'. Yes, collaboration is great in principle, because you share effort and pool ideas and expertise. But in practice, collaboration also makes it even harder to keep track of work, to ensure consistency and to reach agreement.
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Feedback from the wider community is hard to get and to track in a way that makes it easy to discuss and act upon.
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Even when the writing and editing is 'done', the actual publishing usually involves many labour-intensive steps.
And in spite of all the marketing buzz words, most software for writing projects doesn’t actually help much with these challenges.
So, while we could work hard with word processors/wikis/forums/whatever, I’d much rather we work smart…
So, I’ve chosen technologies that facilitate a 'docs like code' approach. [1] I think that this will help to bring vitality to the project in a way that traditional writing tools and processes just can’t.
Eric Weston