Ask HN: Which Wiki or internal documentation tools do you use?

We just start to using it for the same use case you mention. And so far the best solution out there.

I think another requirement to add is diagramming. I think wiki-style diagramming would be a big help for programmers to better communicate ideas.

I've used external tools like draw.io but the overhead for editing, downloading, and uploading I feel gets in the way. Sadly, we are on confluence but don't use the draw.io plugin [1]. Built-in support for dot, uml, or even ascii diagrams [2] would be big help.

[1] https://about.draw.io/integrations/confluence-integration-2/

[2] e.g. https://github.com/ivanceras/svgbob

'Watching' a document is a very important feature which is required in documentation tools. API specs change all the time and developers depending on an evolving API need to check the document on a frequent basis which can be a timesink.

Confluence is also a brilliant tool which supports watching and all the other features listed above, though it can be a bit pricey.

It's not bad. It's not great either. Which is pretty much the best way to describe all Atlassian products. It's unbearable on slow or spotty internet connections. It's riddled with bugs (just the other day my spacebar literally stopped working in their edit view). The formatting gets in your way more than markdown, but at least not as much as something like OneNote.

But, it's powerful. Like any Atlassian product, you can script it to do basically whatever you want. You can organize your company workspaces however you'd like. You can set up tables which can automatically pull summary lines of any other page labeled with a specific label, which is great for automatically building indexes or tables of content.

Overall, I haven't found anything better, and I write a lot of technical documentation for our company.

For comparison's sake:

- Github/Gitlab wikis are pretty bad. There's almost no advantage to using them over just storing markdown in the repository.

- Which, we did for a while, and it works fine, but in its simplicity it misses some of the key features that I do like about Confluence (like those automated index pages and page comments).

- We also used Dropbox Paper for a while; I really like it, but its primarily useful for, let's call them "transactional" documentation (write, get feedback, never look at again); It's not very good at being a Wiki, storing long-term long-form information. And given that Confluence can handle both pretty well, there's not a great argument for adopting a new service from an entirely different company we don't otherwise use.

- We have G-Suite and thus Drive/Docs. The inability to easily write technical documentation with inline/block code makes it a non-starter. No thanks. If Drive added a markdown editor like Dropbox Paper I'd probably push to switch; the search is pretty great, its a platform we already have, and you get a full, amazing document editor for those documents where it makes sense.

- I've never used Quip in a real work setting.

And to make it pretty we use mkdocs material - https://squidfunk.github.io/mkdocs-material/

There's a lot of great extensions that offer more functionality and features too - https://squidfunk.github.io/mkdocs-material/extensions/admon...

There's also extensions not listed in here that you can Google if looking for something specific