Wikibook as a way to enhance the documentation

[linforest]

How about introduce Wikibooks as a way to enhance the documentation of the LOINC and RELMA? Wikibooks is a Wikimedia community for creating a free library of educational textbooks that anyone can edit. In order to be compatible with the existing LOINC license, maybe a limited version of Wikibooks can be used to facilitate the editing, updating, translating (multilingual) and versioning of the traditional MS WORD manuals.

Best Regards,
Lin Zhang
Bethune International Peace Hospital, China

[dvreeman]

This is an interesting idea that we'll have to think about. You are right in noting the separate issues of the copyright of these documents and the technology for enabling community participation. We have discussed moving towards web-based documentation for the Users' Guides (with a pdf export for distribution), but of course it takes resources to setup and work to migrate. MediaWiki is definitely a solid platform and would be strong contender for these use-cases. The main LOINC website uses the content management system Plone, which also has nice internationalization capabilities, and have wondered whether folks would want to translate any of the pages there using that capability. Thanks for the suggestion.