This is extremely hard though. It's not just some wave your magic wand around, or ask people to not be lazy anymore or something. Distilling knowledge, understa

This is extremely hard though. It's not just some wave your magic wand around, or ask people to not be lazy anymore or something. Distilling knowledge, understanding where readers may be coming, seeing the big picture and keeping track of different moving parts, remembering and documenting their histories, all this is real work, real cognitive effort of the highest sort, on par with developing the newest feature or migrating to a new solution or whatever is seen as the "meat" of the work, as opposed to this type of lower-status "meta" work of just documenting. Often, "writing docs" is seen as junior work, something easy. Some parts are of course more straightforward, but a lot of it is very serious work that is underappreciated. And it's a vicious cycle: as long as documentation and technical writing is undervalued, smart rational actors in the company will just do the bare minimum of it and do something more visible and flashy that people do appreciate. ---- Also, I've seen internal wikis and the issue is that they tend to go stale, and people are afraid of removing information, and some people just don't know how to use a wiki and will start using it as a message board or like a Wikipedia talk page and add stuff like "Note by Joe: I'm not sure the above is still correct since the migration to XYZ. Alice should check this part", things not deleted but crossed out with strikethrough style, because "what if it will still be useful" (they don't understand the page history concept) etc. So it becomes a dump of horrible mixture of outdated and up-to-date info, where an experienced employee will tell you "oh it's in the wiki, just check it", then you go back to them that you can't find it or you found contradictory info and they tell you "ah, of course, you should ignore the page on bla bla, we should remove it soon, for this kind of thing you need to check the other page, and even though it says on top that it's 'outdated', actually this part is still valid". The "curse of knowledge" is also very difficult to get rid of. It's really really hard to know where the reader is coming from. And what may be obvious and over-explained for one reader may feel like not enough detail or confusing to another.