[GTALUG] Group knowledge base

[mwilson at Vex.Net]

> How do you or your company maintain group "knowledge base"?  I guess,
> wiki for internal stuffs.

We did this in a small (3-person) team with a largish project.   Moved to
Mediawiki after a trial with a small, obscure, slightly weird wiki
package.  It was a big advantage to have a consistent version of the
development docs available all the time to whoever needed to check them. 
Handover was a lot simpler, since the end-user mostly needed a gloss to
explain how to navigate the technical docs.  Integration with Subversion
let us tie the documentation articles right to the relevant source code.

Usual caveats -- it all depended on good prose writing.  I believe I had
some motivation there, because (after we'd got it going) I would start an
article to explain the program to myself, before I'd worked out the code. 
Docs after the fact are always more boring.

> I'm using Words/Excel files.  A chapter (Word) or worksheet (Excel) for
> different subject or project.  You can insert screenshots, tables, etc.
> Screenshot of installation or picture of DIP switches is way simpler
> than trying to explaining it in words.  You can cut/paste from original
> documentation.

That's kind of a scary excess of locality -- especially if you've seen it
at scale.  That's what the client had been doing before this project tried
a wiki.  They would be on the LAN thumbing through each others'
filesystems looking for things that might be the docs.  !!! ... !!!!