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I think the core problem is this: In building ANY documentation you have a slider between cost, freshness and accuracy. You can pick any two. You can NEVER obta
by crmrc114 6y ago
I think the core problem is this: In building ANY documentation you have a slider between cost, freshness and accuracy. You can pick any two. You can NEVER obtain all three. My last place of work was a large FAANG and we had multiple knowledge management systems.
I was, and still remain firmly in the wiki camp. If you find information out of date date in a wiki you can flag it, comment on it or update it. Wikis are not a "single-source-of-truth". The effort to make everything authoritative and run through 20 layers of approvals kills the will/time/ability to document things and tosses tar into the speedy gears of your documentation machine.
So you have articles from 10 years ago? are they hurting you? No they are not- just because 12 editors did not find them useful does not mean that the 'irrelevant' out of date article from 10 years ago wont help the oncall getting paged at 3AM. Keep your stale data. Lessons learned and documentation of old things can find new ways of being important long past the time that they served their core function.
Storage is cheap. No need to be a deletionist- you gain nothing. What you loose is history and perspective.
Personally I had plenty of documents I would look at that were over 6 years old and I was very thankful to find something from the past- "Ohhhh so that is why we chose this architecture!" so now I can say "Yeah, I actually found out why we did things this way- we no longer need to do this and should revisit how we stand these things up."
What I see is a 3-4 year cycle/tenure/promo/depart on good engineers. If your history only goes back that far then you are basically losing history every generation of engineer. For what it is worth, in my experience, most of the people who propose this sort of thing have never been on the other side of the pager at 3AM.