Wikis can be excellent communication portals.
A user interface should be discoverable enough that the user does not have to read documentation for basic operations. Online help, consistent functionality, tooltips, and descriptive and familiar icons can make an interface discoverable. Users will need to consult documentation for obscure or features that are being tested. A wiki with detailed use instructions is actually a specification for developers. The details on how features are implemented are actually for the users and administrators.
Wikis allow for multiple views of the same data, very much like the tags in gmail. It is possible to categorize and group content into small articles, and link to all related topic.
A large wiki page is harder to translate than a single topic page. Links to all related topics can bring a user from merely using a product, to customizing it, to contributing to it's design, to actually implementing the new features.
It is very important to keep the user and developer pools overlapping. This will save time, allow for easier translation and organization of documentation, and provide ways for new features to be documented before they are implemented.
KDE needs to have a unified wiki again. Simply merge all three of their wikis and start breaking them up into smaller pages. This is a big deal, and I think KDE has had some really inefficient and cumbersome design decisions that could have been avoided by architecting it in a unified environment.
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