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I think searching and linking to existing questions (internally and externally) would be useful.
The useful parts you name sound a lot like a wiki.
Which makes it better than just about every wiki I've used at a company or Github repo which just get out of date because they are so arbitrary and unfocused.
There's nothing like writing up an Evernote or Wiki article on some feature, process, or how/why something works... and then nobody on the team ever reading. I love writing documentation from time to time. But this helps by getting you to write documentation for only things people are asking about.
SO is bad with search, entirely giving it away for Google to find relevant answers. In a wiki, at least I can follow the structure to find relevant pages, but in the heap of badly phrased questions it will be a pain to find anything relevant. I love writing documentation too, but from years participating on Stack Overflow I found it most unreliable for the purpose. As I once quipped, "Imagine Wikipedia where there ar…
Why use this when Discourse is free? It is an open source product that lets you store all the data in your own database. And it’s by the same guys, too.
There's nothing like writing up an Evernote or Wiki article on some feature, process, or how/why something works... and then nobody on the team ever reading. I love writing documentation from time to time. But this helps by getting you to write documentation for only things people are asking about.
SO is bad with search, entirely giving it away for Google to find relevant answers. In a wiki, at least I can follow the structure to find relevant pages, but in the heap of badly phrased questions it will be a pain to find anything relevant. I love writing documentation too, but from years participating on Stack Overflow I found it most unreliable for the purpose. As I once quipped, "Imagine Wikipedia where there ar…
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FWIW, Stack Overflow for Teams isn't a wiki.
Its creator would disagree with you. [1] [1] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2008/12/28/stack-overflow-is-...
In his post here, he kind of directly writes that SO is not like a wiki.
> But you know what does work? A Q&A system. Like Stack Overflow. > Why? Because unlike wikis, you don’t write documentation in the hopes that one day it might help someone.
"Because unlike wikis.."
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SO is bad with search, entirely giving it away for Google to find relevant answers. In a wiki, at least I can follow the structure to find relevant pages, but in the heap of badly phrased questions it will be a pain to find anything relevant. I love writing documentation too, but from years participating on Stack Overflow I found it most unreliable for the purpose. As I once quipped, "Imagine Wikipedia where there ar…
I think SO and pure documentation would serve two separate purposes. Sometimes documentation is better for something like an internal library API or related information. But on the other hand, sometimes having a an SO-like place where I can go look up a question related to a quick thing I'm trying to do would be useful. Say I don't remember the process to build the latest version of a Java package and upload it to an…
Meanwhile SO answers are much more granular and easier to update for that reason.
For example, trying to transactionally update a large page on the org database system instead of an SO question about the parameters you need to connect to it. I can see SO winning here because the units of work are much smaller.
There's nothing like writing up an Evernote or Wiki article on some feature, process, or how/why something works... and then nobody on the team ever reading. I love writing documentation from time to time. But this helps by getting you to write documentation for only things people are asking about.
SO is bad with search, entirely giving it away for Google to find relevant answers. In a wiki, at least I can follow the structure to find relevant pages, but in the heap of badly phrased questions it will be a pain to find anything relevant. I love writing documentation too, but from years participating on Stack Overflow I found it most unreliable for the purpose. As I once quipped, "Imagine Wikipedia where there ar…
So many StackOverflow posts consist of, "I searched how to do X, I copy and pasted the code from the StackOverflow answer that came up, and it doesn't work for me."
You can usually google a few lines of code and find out where they got it from originally.
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SO is bad with search, entirely giving it away for Google to find relevant answers. In a wiki, at least I can follow the structure to find relevant pages, but in the heap of badly phrased questions it will be a pain to find anything relevant. I love writing documentation too, but from years participating on Stack Overflow I found it most unreliable for the purpose. As I once quipped, "Imagine Wikipedia where there ar…
>> And every single day several kids from elementary school start a new one. So many StackOverflow posts consist of, "I searched how to do X, I copy and pasted the code from the StackOverflow answer that came up, and it doesn't work for me." You can usually google a few lines of code and find out where they got it from originally.
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"Documentation on-demand" seems a great solution indeed! Although $5/month per user is not cheap. I work at a medium-sized funded startup and I doubt it would be approved for overall use (as it would be nice to include other teams as well, like Marketing, Analytics, Customer Support). It is the same price of GSuite, that adds a ton more value than SO for Teams could ever add.
I just figured this out, but that's $5/month for _active_ users. So if you don't use it, you don't pay for it. Not exactly sure what counts as an "active" user though.