Ask HN: Is every company's internal wiki just broken by default?

This is why knowledge management is such a popular use for POCs involving LLMs, and ironically also why POCs don't progress into something more permanent

When people join your team, stress this point. In the onboarding, require them to make at least one change to the documentation during their first week. People tend to think that documentation is someone else's responsibility, and it just isn't so.

The main problem is not a lack of documentation, but being able to find it. Search is woeful in all the documentation systems I've used. The only thing that can save the day is proper linking of related articles.

By default, people tend to throw documentation into a hierarchy. While that works for many things, it creates a structure that ultimately makes it hard to find things. Most documentation is related to a few different areas or domains, and with a hierarchy, you can only put it into a single "folder."

Any time you add a piece of documentation, you should link to it from at least two different places. Spend a moment and think about the person who will look for the thing you just documented. Where are they likely to look for it? Link it there.

If you ever look for something like OP, and can not find it easily, but ultimately do find it, add links to it in the places you looked earlier.

Over time, if enough people do this, the documentation will get decent or even good.

It's a solved problem in the sense that there is a solution, but the solution is not automatic. It requires someone to manage the process and the people to keep the documentation in a good state.

I wrote an article about this some time ago: https://koliber.com/articles/engineering-documentation-best-...

After seeing some people delete some big docs I wrote, which I think were still good, and changing documentation platforms so many times (usually to platforms with higher friction), my motivation to be a champion for good documentation has waned significantly. I still do write good readme files for my code, and end user docs for its use, but all the other little nice to have stuff I mostly just keep to myself in my own system. I’m sick of the changes, the friction, and people blindly deleting my work out of ignorance.

I don’t have a clear answer, but I think the future lies in automatic capture + AI search, not manual input + folder systems.

For us, once we started recording all meetings, the voice conversations became searchable. I'm looking forward to the same kind of AI-first approach for written docs too.

literally every manager had "documentation accuracy" as a metric for their domain and they were generally good about things like "did you check the wiki?" when asked questions -- which usually led to a "okay, once you find it, add it"

every single company with confluence was a disaster of unreadable garbage. one place got so bad the ops / support had their own "secret server" of internal docs which were mostly links to text files

Your experience was the motivation for StackOverflow.

It's goal was to be better at surfacing information than forums and the Usenet.