A portion of my job is to maintain technical documentation for a rapidly expandi

Question

A portion of my job is to maintain technical documentation for a rapidly expanding manufacturing company. Because it is only a portion of my job and the company's product line is expanding so quickly, I can't stay on top of the documentation. As a result, I've been yearning for an information management system with a handful of specific features. I've found many products that have a subset, but none that have all the features I'm looking for.

I'm at the point of picking an existing product and expanding it to cover my desired feature set, however, this will be a pet project and I will be learning the underlying language as I go. So, the main question is which existing product will be the easiest to expand to cover the full feature set and has a relatively easy to learn language? Alternatively, have I missed another existing program that will cover the feature set or should be in my list of "close, but not quite there"?

Feature Set
web interface
based on a distributed version control system (e.g., git)
easy to edit by logged in novices (e.g. wiki, multimarkdown)
outputs in more traditional formats (e.g., doc, odt, pdf)
edits held in queue until editor/engineer/manager approves them (e.g., MS Word editing) [this is the really big elephant in list - suggestions on where to start appreciated]
edits held in queue specifically for engineer approval [extra limb of the elephant in the list]
well-supported in the open source community

Explanation / Answer

You may be able to handle this with Github's built-in Wiki feature. What's nice about the Github Wiki is that it is tracked as a separate Git repository. A developer more comfortable with Git and a Markdown editor like Mou can just clone the repository and work locally while less technical users can use the Github web interface.

As far as a feature-by-feature breakdown, here's some more information

web interface

The Github Wiki interface has a web interface that lends itself to use by non-technical writers.

based on a distributed version control system (e.g., git)

Github is using Git under the hood.

easy to edit by logged in novices (e.g. wiki, multimarkdown)

See the first answer. The format of the Github wiki is markdown... (edit: and I think they expanded the available formats since I wrote this? You can author is one of ten lightweight text syntax choices)

outputs in more traditional formats (e.g., doc, odt, pdf)

There is no web-based option to export as a DOC, ODT, or PDF, but there are a number of tools out there that support Markdown conversion to these formats. Just search for Markdown editors. Couple this with the fact that you can just clone the source of a Github Wiki and I think you could do this easily.

edits held in queue until editor/engineer/manager approves them (e.g., MS Word editing)

Nope, but you could get creative here. Imagine to Github Wikis - take one of them and make them the "draft" wiki. Commits to this wiki could be tracked and maybe you could use something like Gerrit to review and push changes to another repository. (http://code.google.com/p/gerrit/)

well-supported in the open source community

Github is the open source community.

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