WingNews logo WingNews
top | item 33710398

(no title)

origin_path | 3 years ago

It does matter because the issue with wikis (not just confluence) is there's no approval or review workflow. Imagine trying to write a large program in which everyone could just commit at will, with no review process whatsoever, and where nobody had made any decisions about design up front. There'd be duplication, dead code, the organization would be crazy.

That's the average wiki. It's a commons and a tragic one. To make docs work you have to treat it more like a codebase: clear ownership, standards, review processes, approvals, up front design, refactoring efforts etc.

discuss

order

beachy|3 years ago

> To make docs work you have to treat it more like a codebase: clear ownership, standards, review processes, approvals, up front design, refactoring efforts etc.

Maybe true in large orgs.

But for smaller companies what I've seen is usually paralysis.

e.g. someone notes a problem (maybe just a typo) in the doc. Can they fix it within seconds? If instead they need to raise a ticket then most likely it ain't happening. They move on, and the next person experiences the same problem.

IMO the default should indeed be towards everyone committing at will. Yes that will result in the occasional snafu. Fix that when it happens. (obviously not good practice for the operating manual for a nuclear power plant - but for a <500 person Saas company it is).

triceratops|3 years ago

Ticket, or pull request?

Mandating a Jira ticket for simple typo fixes is overkill. But if you make it easy to create a PR directly on the documentation file, without leaving the tab, I don't see an issue. This is already a Github feature.

heydonovan|3 years ago

Disagree. A ticket should be created for any change, no matter how small. It takes seconds to write a title, body and hit submit. I've seen those small ad-hoc changes cause havoc because someone forgot to escape a single quote or didn't realize tabs were necessary and replaced them with spaces.

The default for Confluence is just that, everyone commits at will. There is no structure, tons of duplication, no standards when it comes to naming, formatting, audience, etc. I'm a huge fan of markdown/plain-text solutions, only because linters can be run that force you down one happy path. I don't believe Confluence has linters at all.

lukewiwa|3 years ago

The last thing I want is to raise the friction for writing down documentation.

It's hard enough to get technical minded people to contribute to a git (or style) based knowledge base.

Pick your poison I guess but I'm quite happy to have testers/BAs/directors/etc able to quickly jot down thoughts roughly than have it disappear into the ether.

Viliam1234|3 years ago

> The last thing I want is to raise the friction for writing down documentation.

A better solution might be that anyone can write the documentation, and there is a maintainer who constantly refactors the wiki to keep it legible. Makes sure the information is not duplicated, adds hyperlinks to things, etc.

Aeolun|3 years ago

I mean. I guess? The difference between having it written down in Confluence and disappearing into the ether is academic though. Either way nobody will ever find the information again.

pxc|3 years ago

There are some really nice git-based wiki systems out there, and one is built into GitHub and GitLab. If you want that type of workflow for your wiki, it's easy to get.

TylerE|3 years ago

A couple of jobs ago (so we’re talking like late 00s) I rolled an internal wiki system on top of mercurial.

It was a directory of files - I think plain text with a few wiki shortcuts, but might have been some sort of early Markdown.

The editing form was basically a text area on top of mercurial.

Similarly things like the edit log were basically dumping the mercurial output into html.

No clue how long it lasted, but it was still in regular use when I left in 2012.

Wrote the whole thing in a few afternoons.