[GTALUG] Group knowledge base

[David Thornton]

Hi,

I feel old because I can say that I have worked with most of the systems
mentioned so far: I have a personal professional policy of spending the
energy to get good at a given tool before I critique it. If I have not
"gone deep" with tool X I'll say so.

1. Confluence - I agree that the search is horrid. It's got a couple of
annoyances. For example I can't seem to make page anchors. If I make
something a heading it gets an anchor but I want to make anchors in other
places. The docs say you  can but I haven't been able to get that to work.
Also I've not done much semantic work in confluence.

2. Lotus Notes; that was a long time ago, I liked it, I don't recall there
being any bog issue that kept me from getting the job done.

3. Mediawiki - my personal fav only because 1. OSS 2. plugable such that I
can get neat semantic stuff to work. I use categories a lot, I use REDIRECT
alot. I'm a firm believer in loose pluralism to start and rigorous
lexicography as time passed. I love that I can do a stand alone server
deploy of it, a two tier version, a containerized version, a cloud version,
or a massive scaled out version. I love being able to do fancy
semantic work in mediawiki. ( see
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_wiki )

4. Post Lotus Notes and Pre-mediawiki, I lived in Word docs. It was
technically less sex, and required what now seems to be clunky process, but
it was functional: track changes, versioned files etc . I even wrote
macros that would maintain change logs and version numbers for documents.
There are obvious cross platform issues. But maybe a gsuite docs version
might work?

5. I was able to operate with Sharepoint , but only barely. I asked very
little of it, and it delivered. :P It seems like it encouraged complexity
for no good reason.

6. I've also used Tettra, a commercial provider. It's very simplistic. If
your needs are simple it might be for you. I managed my expectations and it
hampered me still.

Another approach I have been toying is the "Documentation goes with code"
approach. That is markdown files in code repos. Think README.md I like
this. markdown is lightweight and easy to get. There can be duplication
depending on application. Documentation about the software _where-ever_ you
deploy it goes with the code. Documentation about how you
have _specifically _ deployed it goes in the wiki. Operational lessons go
in the wiki.

I'm notorious for putting a hockey stick in the "number of pages" graphs
for a given company's knowledge base. Which is to say I make the count go
up quickly. IMHO documentation is an operational responsibility, like
keeping the server up. It's also the responsibility of the architect.

I'm also a strong proponent of organic growth but also "good curation". It
should be easy for individuals to document as they desire. But the
resulting "mess" should be curated, such that the plethora of view-points
over time become a coherent, if dynamic, story.

The system should not be so complicated as to be a "barrier to entry".  It
should be easy to add new documents, and correct mistakes. It should be
auditable. Depending on how serious you are about documentations it should
also have good analytics.  It should support multi-media reasonably. You
should be able to search it well. It should support some type of "synonym"
system . In mediawiki I use #REDIRECT alot. If you are using a slang term
for something, Imma catch that and send you to the canonical name.

I've not used Dokuwiki.

David


On Thu, Oct 29, 2020 at 10:17 PM William Park via talk <talk at gtalug.org>
wrote:

> How do you or your company maintain group "knowledge base"?  I guess,
> wiki for internal stuffs.
>
> 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.
>
> But, I'm curious what others are using.
> --
> William Park <opengeometry at yahoo.ca>
> ---
> Post to this mailing list talk at gtalug.org
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-- 
David Thornton
https://wiki.quadratic.net
https://github.com/drthornt/
https://twitter.com/northdot9/
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