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

20 NanaAmun 31 7/9/2025, 9:05:39 AM
I just wasted half my morning digging through people's profiles trying to find something, only to randomly stumble on the real answer buried in a random comment under a half-related post. I feel like I spend hours each week sifting through Confluence, I know there's valuable stuff in there, but the search is impressively useless, and the people who actually know how anything works are either impossible to reach or long-gone contractors. Am I losing it, or is this just how it is everywhere? I'm at a F500 company, so nothing's changing here anytime soon, I’m thinking of jumping ship.

Regardless, Is this a solved problem? What are the common failure modes of knowledge management systems like Confluence in large organizations, and what are some strategies or alternative tools that have successfully combated this? There’s no way that no one has solved this.

Comments (31)

nlpnerd · 8m ago
Common failure mode is people. Most processes eventually fail when people start to slack on the little things, then the big things. Every part of knowledge management is tedious from capturing things to keeping them organized and discoverable. For any large organizations, there are a ton of knowledge that will remain tribal despite best efforts.

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

koliber · 38m ago
Documentation needs to be maintained. Period. There are no shortcuts.

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-...

NanaAmun · 29m ago
Totally agree, search is the real bottleneck. Linking from multiple places is such a simple but powerful habit, but again, I guess it comes down to people being lazy.
al_borland · 2h ago
The big issue, regardless of the platform, has been getting people to care about documentation. Those who are most qualified to write it, are usually the ones least likely to care about, because they don’t need it. I tried to buck this trend, as up-skilling others, in ways that didn’t require my constant time, seemed like a win. I tried to lead my example, but no one else ever joined in. I tried putting something together to formalize the process of reviews and got nothing but lazy rubber stamps, even from people who typically did excellent work. Getting people to care is the hardest part, in my experience. The bigger the organization, the worse this problems seems to get.

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.

freedomben · 1h ago
I fully agree with your analysis here, but I would also add that documentation getting out of date is also a huge problem. Out-of-date documentation can be worse than no documentation at all when it is actively wrong. With the pace at which many software projects change, it can take almost no time at all for documentation to get out of date. Even just business processes often change quickly enough that information on the wiki becomes misleading.

Now that said, I have yet to actually use a platform with a good search functionality too. If stuff was easier to find, I strongly suspect that documentation would be better maintained, (provided that there is a cultural value around it)

perrygeo · 1h ago
> Out-of-date documentation can be worse than no documentation

One solution to this is to write structured and testable documentation. Easier said than done, but if your docs get regularly integration/e2e tested against reality, they stand a much better shot at staying up to date. I always recommend moving the docs as close to the development work as possible - ie docs get checked into git alongside the code and make sure tests fail if anything changes.

NanaAmun · 1h ago
Imo this just leads to out of date docs within the code it self. We have a no comment policy at the place I work for this reason.
NanaAmun · 1h ago
Exactly, If I can’t find 90% of the docs, chances are most other people can’t either, therefore no ones maintaining them.
dataflow · 2h ago
Get people to be rewarded for it and they'll immediately care, I think? It's hard to blame people for not caring about something that has no impact on their performance reviews.
NanaAmun · 1h ago
Sounds like we work at the same place.
dhussoe · 15m ago
I find wikis to always rot. In-code class/function/library documentation and --help for CLI tools are more likely to be updated when anything changes.
Rastonbury · 1h ago
I'd say 2/3 of the time I find what I'm looking for on first page of search using Confluence, 2nd page is totally irrelevant. So I'd say it's not that it's broken, it's just that it isn't there and that tribal knowledge isn't written. So imo forcing tribal knowledge to be written documented is the issue. LLMs won't help here because a contractor or first line employee has conflicted incentives whether to document their tribal knowledge which loses them value
ferguess_k · 1h ago
None of the companies I worked for have decent documentation. I'd say either one needs to read comments in code, or hire someone specifically for writing docs, like the more traditional companies.
yamatokaneko · 7h ago
I don’t think it’s about the tool. Whether it’s Confluence or Notion, if the company doesn’t value documentation, it’s never going to stick.

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.

shadag · 6h ago
You're so right it's not about the tool it's about the culture and focus on excellence which translates to writing excellent internal docs for engineers to get things done. I'm not quite sure how recording everything would work. The real things we need are docs that are updated when there are issues with CI/CD after people read logs etc... recording things might work for more business or commercial teams but for us we just need people to keep everything up to date and well written.
NanaAmun · 6h ago
Yeah, we’re trying that too, not going great haha. Recording everything sounds good tho, no clue how that would play with PCI DSS.
shadag · 6h ago
Yeah PCI DSS makes it virtually impossible. My company would take five years to adopt that
red-iron-pine · 2h ago
only one that i've seen that wasn't 100% borked was a doku wiki at the niche MSP I started at in IT.

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

aidanferguson · 5h ago
Recently worked at a large sized international corp. tbh I don't blame you, this was part of the reason I left for a smaller company. Best solution I found was to search by keywords and crawl thru results with GPT. Not exactly ideal but much better than navigating the insane hierarchy of pages littered with corporate buzzwords
muzani · 4h ago
Interesting. We argue that Confluence was the best tool we have and has some of the best search. People would rather write in GDocs, but ironically, the search has been much worse.
NanaAmun · 4h ago
Do you guys just dump all the dev/depl logs and docs into Confluence? Or is it more curated?
muzani · 3h ago
I'm not sure what you mean by dev/depl log, but there's architectural decision records in there. There's spike docs, which look into how long something would take - some have useful decision research, but they're generally not scrubbed out when done. Old stuff is swept into some "Archives" folder.

Search is the real value though. I never remember where a certain doc is stored. But if I can remember who wrote it or some snippet from it, I can find it. They link to each other well. Another pointer is from Slack; maybe it needs this kind of combo to work well together?

NanaAmun · 1h ago
Yeah, that makes sense, but that "if you remember who wrote it or a snippet" part is exactly the problem for me. If you’re not already in the loop, or new to the project, that context just isn’t there. Good search should work even when your memory doesn’t.
brudgers · 4h ago
Is this a solved problem?

Your experience was the motivation for StackOverflow.

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

lhmiles · 6h ago
You can download everything and embed it with Google api and dump it in postgres with pgvector. Works pretty well for me for similar situation
NanaAmun · 6h ago
I get that, but scale’s the issue, there are over 10k engineers at my current company. I just don’t see how it scales when people are dumping tens of thousands of lines of logs into it daily. You can download everything and embed it using the Google API, then store it in Postgres with pgvector. At this scale, I’m not sure if it would hold up.
shadag · 6h ago
I totally agree with you. The solution mentioned above is useful but in my current company there is no way that can actually work long term for an individual engineer or my team.
shadag · 6h ago
That's an awesome solution - I'm going try that! Do people have other ways of doing that?
NanaAmun · 6h ago
Yes! We just use MS Teams and keep a megathread of links honestly, it’s the best way we’ve found to manage it.
shadag · 6h ago
that's insane though. On a team scale this can somehow be managed by company has like 5,000 engineers on the main Teams channel. Surely there is a better way
flawstick · 6h ago
For midsized corp it depends on if the company actually cares, i.e. their philosophy, which is horrid most of the time and doesn't even touch on wikis, and when it comes to larger corporations, it is broken whether anyone likes it or not, because the sheer amount of information becomes unnavigable and unorganizable really easily.