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Ask HN: How does your team handle knowledge documentation?

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Re: Ask HN: How does your team handle knowledge documentation?

#31

Post by dalemyers »

avn2109 wrote: post #24
billconan wrote: post #21

We use mediawiki and and recently IT invested in confluence. I hate it, because it's slow. but I do see it has some benefits, for example, it automatically generates a content table. so content discovery is easier. it is also designed to be a document system for a software company. you can use it to create meeting notes and tag people. but overall, I liked mediawiki, the problem with it is, it's hard to make sure thi…

We too use Confluence and it's abundantly unbelievably awful. * Super bloated and laggy * Hard to get your data out/migrate to some rival system. Did your technical writers spend a bunch of time typing strings into a table using the Confluence table building GUI, and now you want that data as a .csv? Too bad, hope you want to spend half an hour in copy-and-paste + reformatting hell. * Impressively broken search (e.g.…

These are basically the same issues we have. We've ruled it out entirely as a suggestion. Markdown documents and searching on disk is better than Confluence.

Re: Ask HN: How does your team handle knowledge documentation?

#32

Post by dsr_ »

wink wrote: post #19

How? Badly. Right now it's a GitHub wiki in our "infrastructure" repo (which is basically all the bits and pieces that don't fit anywhere and don't have a proper repo of their own). We migrated to this from: "several github wikis, each in the repo of the project" - but often you have overlap and it was bad to find stuff. Pros: - easy backup (git clone) - markdown - easy to get started, "good enough" Meh: - searchable…

gitit is a lightweight wiki that:

reads markdown

has an online editor available

stores in git

and is searchable.

Re: Ask HN: How does your team handle knowledge documentation?

#33

Post by wila »

billconan wrote: post #21

We use mediawiki and and recently IT invested in confluence. I hate it, because it's slow. but I do see it has some benefits, for example, it automatically generates a content table. so content discovery is easier. it is also designed to be a document system for a software company. you can use it to create meeting notes and tag people. but overall, I liked mediawiki, the problem with it is, it's hard to make sure thi…

Yep, also use confluence wiki for a customer and it is horrible. For another company I use mediawiki. Nothing beats that.

Easy to edit, easy to maintain, good search capabilities, plenty of ways to extend.

Edit: for updates of mediawiki use installatron, for structuring documentation you can use categories.

Re: Ask HN: How does your team handle knowledge documentation?

#34

Post by anotheryou »

billconan wrote: post #21

We use mediawiki and and recently IT invested in confluence. I hate it, because it's slow. but I do see it has some benefits, for example, it automatically generates a content table. so content discovery is easier. it is also designed to be a document system for a software company. you can use it to create meeting notes and tag people. but overall, I liked mediawiki, the problem with it is, it's hard to make sure thi…

There are some big confluence UI annoyances though:

- wide screen support (paragraphs to across the whole screen)

- Every page is a folder and the add-button is visually above the current page in the hierarchy, but creates a child page. Easy for techies once they figured it out, hard for new people and the rest of the company.

- no tree-view by default

- comments can't be seen in edit-mode

- no markdown

Biggest pro though:

- collaborative editing in a wiki (and still a dedicated edit-mode so work in progress remains hidden from those trying to just read the resource)

Re: Ask HN: How does your team handle knowledge documentation?

#35

Post by melissam »

We are using Jive for all of our internal documentation which works really well for us. For deep documentation, both new document requests and document updates are submitted using a built-in "Ideas" feature. "Ideas" can include plain text, links, images, or videos, and can be submitted by anyone in the company. With this information, we can create a new document, save it in Jive, and then respond to the "Idea" with a "The document is done and here's the link to it" comment. For quick fire Q&A, we've created a page in Jive that uses built-in "Questions" and "Answers" features, again, accessible to anyone in the company. Jive's search feature is pretty robust (keyword-indexes anything you add to it without having to create tags, though you can add tags if you want).

Re: Ask HN: How does your team handle knowledge documentation?

#36

Post by 2muchcoffeeman »

billconan wrote: post #21

We use mediawiki and and recently IT invested in confluence. I hate it, because it's slow. but I do see it has some benefits, for example, it automatically generates a content table. so content discovery is easier. it is also designed to be a document system for a software company. you can use it to create meeting notes and tag people. but overall, I liked mediawiki, the problem with it is, it's hard to make sure thi…

Pretty sure on a blank page Confluence has no table of contents. I am always adding those to pages. Maybe you are using a template. My recollection of using MediaWiki is that it was also better in that regard.

Re: Ask HN: How does your team handle knowledge documentation?

#37

Post by clintonb »

At Vistaprint, we used MediaWiki, hired a dedicated librarian, and, most importantly, had a culture of documenting everything on the wiki. The last point is most important. Everyone in the organization _must_ adopt the mindset of checking the wiki first. If the information is not on the wiki, figure it out, and put on the wiki. I vaguely remember wiki articles even being a (minor) metric for annual reviews. At one point, Vistaprint tried SharePoint but we quickly went back to MediaWiki.

At edX we have information spread between Confluence and Google Drive. Search is not ideal for either. Information sharing is not great.

Re: Ask HN: How does your team handle knowledge documentation?

#38

Post by oschn »

We used MediaWiki for documentations, however we were very unhappy with it. We have almost all an computer science background, but did not like the MediaWiki syntax and the interface.

We created Teamemo (https://teamemo.com) because knowledge management should be easy, fast and fun.

Re: Ask HN: How does your team handle knowledge documentation?

#39

Post by mabbo »

wink wrote: post #19

How? Badly. Right now it's a GitHub wiki in our "infrastructure" repo (which is basically all the bits and pieces that don't fit anywhere and don't have a proper repo of their own). We migrated to this from: "several github wikis, each in the repo of the project" - but often you have overlap and it was bad to find stuff. Pros: - easy backup (git clone) - markdown - easy to get started, "good enough" Meh: - searchable…

> How? Badly.

I was about to make this same joke. Glad to hear that everyone is just as screwed on this.

Re: Ask HN: How does your team handle knowledge documentation?

#40

Post by cableshaft »

We have a 'this person better not be hit by a bus or quit on us' policy, or nearly so.

We have people get assigned tasks from other projects from time to time, and they start picking up bits and pieces of the projects from that. And we have an internal wiki that documents some things that people aren't very good about keeping up to date or making it comprehensive.

Also some of our software has gone through rewrites that has cleaned up the architecture and made them easier to understand and work with, without documentation.

But there's still way too much locked in people's heads. We've lost quite a bit of it, too, as people have left over time. I know we're trying to convince a client to shift over to newer versions of our software, because we no longer have anyone that knows anything about the tech the legacy legacy software was written in (it's legacy software that predates our existing legacy software).

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