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I agree with Tafster. I've been a consultant for 6 years and so I've seen dozens of knowledge bases and wikis. Some companies even have great processes to fill

by cm2012 6y ago

I agree with Tafster. I've been a consultant for 6 years and so I've seen dozens of knowledge bases and wikis. Some companies even have great processes to fill them in. I have never, ever seen a company where those wikis are actually read. One company I worked with had a very detailed weekly logging of changes, important things etc. The goal was to keep other teams informed of what each team was doing. It took many times many hours a week to keep it up to date. When they looked at the usage log, literally no one logged into to read the stuff except when going into to upload their part.

etothepii 6y ago
> I have never, ever seen a company where those wikis are actually read. The problem with documentation is that it is the making of it that creates most of the value. Like so many things the value looks like duplication.
antonvs 6y ago
> I have never, ever seen a company where those wikis are actually read. This misses a key point. When I get a query that's answered by something on the wiki, I reply with a link to the wiki. If the wiki link isn't fully relevant, if possible I update it before replying. If I have to write significant new content to respond to the query, I create a wiki page. Your attitude of "docs are useless" is self-fulfilling. Docs are only useless in companies that actively want them to be useless. And those companies are, with no exceptions, seriously dysfunctional.
- afarrell 6y ago
  > Docs are only useless in companies that actively want them to be useless. Like most things in life, it takes active effort of ongoing maintenance. https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27023 https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27023
- Viliam1234 6y ago
  > Your attitude of "docs are useless" is self-fulfilling. Yes. Of course the docs are horrible, if no one can take time to improve them, because improving them is not "real work". Spending one day fixing the wiki pages to make information easy to find, that's one wasted man-day! On the other hand, the whole team spending a few hours in meetings to clarify misunderstandings that would not happen if there was one clearly written wiki page about the topic... that's okay, because communication is important. I think another problem is that things work bad by default whenever the "customer" is not in a position to give feedback and require improvement. Suppose the developer needs an information, and the wiki page is hard to understand. The developer is hardly in a position to request a rewrite from the author -- the author has more knowledge (about given topic) and therefore is in a stronger position. Also, the author may choose to explain verbally or in e-mail, and then the wiki remains unfixed.
nitwit005 6y ago
Isn't a low read count fine in most cases? I wrote up some documents on setting up some apps in AWS. I expected those to be read maybe 2-4 times over their lifetime (and maybe some random browsing). There just aren't many people that should have to go through the steps. Still a net time savings as those people won't have to reverse engineer things.

by cm2012 6y ago

etothepii 6y ago

> I have never, ever seen a company where those wikis are actually read. The problem with documentation is that it is the making of it that creates most of the value. Like so many things the value looks like duplication.

antonvs 6y ago

> I have never, ever seen a company where those wikis are actually read. This misses a key point. When I get a query that's answered by something on the wiki, I reply with a link to the wiki. If the wiki link isn't fully relevant, if possible I update it before replying. If I have to write significant new content to respond to the query, I create a wiki page. Your attitude of "docs are useless" is self-fulfilling. Docs are only useless in companies that actively want them to be useless. And those companies are, with no exceptions, seriously dysfunctional.

afarrell 6y ago
> Docs are only useless in companies that actively want them to be useless. Like most things in life, it takes active effort of ongoing maintenance. https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27023 https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27023
Viliam1234 6y ago
> Your attitude of "docs are useless" is self-fulfilling. Yes. Of course the docs are horrible, if no one can take time to improve them, because improving them is not "real work". Spending one day fixing the wiki pages to make information easy to find, that's one wasted man-day! On the other hand, the whole team spending a few hours in meetings to clarify misunderstandings that would not happen if there was one clearly written wiki page about the topic... that's okay, because communication is important. I think another problem is that things work bad by default whenever the "customer" is not in a position to give feedback and require improvement. Suppose the developer needs an information, and the wiki page is hard to understand. The developer is hardly in a position to request a rewrite from the author -- the author has more knowledge (about given topic) and therefore is in a stronger position. Also, the author may choose to explain verbally or in e-mail, and then the wiki remains unfixed.

nitwit005 6y ago

Isn't a low read count fine in most cases? I wrote up some documents on setting up some apps in AWS. I expected those to be read maybe 2-4 times over their lifetime (and maybe some random browsing). There just aren't many people that should have to go through the steps. Still a net time savings as those people won't have to reverse engineer things.