Daryl Colquhoun has written an article in tcWorld about the international standard ISO/IEC/IEEE 26512. He explained the standard is going to be revised and renamed: from “Systems and software engineering – Requirements for managers of user documentation” to “Systems and software engineering – Requirements for managers of information for users”.
The reason for this, he states, is because, in many parts of the world, the term “documentation” is associated with a printed manual only. The neutral term “information for users” refers to all types of content: Online help, audio, video, and Augmented Reality.
The problem with “information” is it can mean many things. Information for users could mean the weather forecast. We may well need to move away from the word documentation, but I’m not sure we’ve yet come up with a suitable alternative.
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