Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 77 posts

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

#31

Post by wj »

013a wrote: post #18

Confluence. 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…

I just rolled out Confluence a couple of weeks ago after really struggling to find a better option. I looked at Quip but it felt more informal than I was comfortable in particularly the lack of ability to setup teams and permissions that way.

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

#33

Post by pekko »

013a wrote: post #18

Confluence. 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…

My experience of Quip is very similiar to how you described Dropbox Paper (which I haven't used): write, get feedback with in-line comments, collaborate, and forget the whole thing. But it's nice, slim, and fast.

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

#34

Post by ArmandGrillet »

Stack Overflow for Teams works great from my experience. Having a wiki using Confluence is good for questions related to travel and processes but SO is the best for engineers due to its integration with Slack and ease of use (fast search, good formatting, tags).

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

#35

Post by fran7118 »

I've used [Wyam](https://wyam.io/) for some dotnet stuff and it works pretty well. Docs are written in markdown and it generates a static site with them. It can also generate api docs pages (with a search interface) from C# source files or compiled libs which was pretty cool IMHO.

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

#36

Post by Ninjaneered »

MediaWiki.

The downside is that to get it running with a good set of extensions that optimizes it for enterprise use takes a bit of an effort.

The upside is that once you do, it becomes an incredibly powerful tool that most users adopt without complaint. It hits all the OPs requests for searchable, code snippets (with syntax highlighting), and hyperlinking. When you add the ability to store and reuse structured data (Cargo or Semantic MediaWiki) it really becomes powerful.

Others I've tried:

- SharePoint (this is so bad it pains me to mention it)

- Confluence (not bad, but lacks structured data and seems to be focused on serving smaller teams vs. an entire company)

- OneNote (great for personal use, not as great for teams, especially not great at tracking multi-user changes)

- EverNote (great for personal use, not as great for teams, especially not great at tracking multi-user changes)

- Salesforce Knowledge (Didn't get too deep, but seemed better for help desk answer queue than internal documentation)

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

#37

Post by emerongi »

anant90 wrote: post #23
juvoni wrote: post #10

Notion ( https://notion.so ) All in one workspace, combines, trello, airtable, evernote, and docs. Great embed support and awesome for small teams and personal use. It's a modern day commonplace book.

The only reason I gave up on Notion sometime last year was that it was mind-numbingly slow. Great product otherwise.

I wouldn't say mind-numbingly slow, but it does struggle sometimes. The Android app is a bit poor as well in my opinion - gets the job done, but I've seen better ones by competitors.

Despite those issues, I have fully switched over to Notion. Instead of trying to force some very specific workflow onto you, it just offers a great toolkit that you can use to manage your own work whichever way you like it.

I would prefer a native app over a web app, but I guess that's just the world that we live in today.

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

#39

Post by aasasd »

epage wrote: post #14

> Some basic requirements are: - searchable - code snippets - hyperlinking 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 supp…

Mermaid is a “Markdown for diagrams” that seems to use a more semantic markup instead of ASCII art: https://github.com/knsv/mermaid

Would probably work nice as a plugin for a wiki.

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

#40

Post by DanielBMarkham »

I installed MediaWiki for a personal project, and I love it. I've used a lot of other tools. Somehow the fact that the Wiki folks have heavily used the tool brings out all of the features you'd ever want, even if the implementation might be a bit clunky at times.
Post reply on HN