I love writing documentation from time to time. But this helps by getting you to write documentation for only things people are asking about.
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 are several hundred articles on the New York city. And one that Google links first is copy-pasted from Encyclopedia Britannica, 1913. And every single day several kids from elementary school start a new one."
SO is torn between essentially ambiguous goals, providing fast on-site answers and being a reusable knowledge base. And it's good with the latter only because of Google. Without Google it will be no better than fast on-site answers on Slack.
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.
The front page for Teams boasts it's better than your "stale wikis and lost emails" but in reality there are much more stale answers on SO than anywhere else.
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.
Having said that, my gut feeling is that SO "Teams" product will succeed in enterprise (& small companies). Managers love if their employees take time to create "Summary pages" from the "Slack and other Chat products". But employees "do not have time" for "Summary pages" and there is no formal structure in 'Slack'. I think this Pages product product provide that 'structure' and a way to measure/monitor by manageres.
> SO is torn between essentially ambiguous goals, providing fast on-site answers and being a reusable knowledge base.
> And it's good with the latter only because of Google. Without Google it will be no better than fast on-site answers on Slack.
Wow! You have much more disciplined coworkers than most of us, then. I've been at my current employer for about 13 years now. We've gone through 3 or 4 different wikis. Right now we're split between Confluence (worst wiki software I've ever used) and an in-house solution. I can't find a god damned thing on either one. They're both awful, and so were the predecessors. Maintaining any kind of documentation takes work and our employer just doesn't give us enough time to do that and our jobs.
Specifically regarding structure:
- every page has breadcrumbs letting you navigate up to its parents
- "child view" macro shows all children of this page automatically, so you can easily make a "category" page linking similar issues that is always up to date
- can move pages to new parents/spaces with a few clicks, or en masse with a drag-and-drop tree view
- built-in widget that searches only children of the page you embed it into
- spaces so you can tell a page in the search is owned by a different section of the team
Plus just a way lower barrier to entry than Wikipedia or the other wikis I've contributed to. I love Confluence.
Citation needed. I use it almost daily and it's essentially write-only and pretty unusably so at that.
>... it's essentially write-only
Seems like there's no disagreement here :)
Anyway, as I see it, as someone who has written quite enough if it, most software documentation is write-only 99% of the time; but it is occasionally very handy to have that documentation written by the original developers when shit really hits the fan.
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.
If you're much larger than 10 - creeping into the 200+ people, it might be better to go with Enterprise: https://stackoverflow.com/enterprise
I always have the impression that "Enterprise" plans are more expensive, but probably is just a misconception of mine.
This argument would make a lot more sense if it was $500 per month per dev, which some SaaS companies actually do charge per-seat for enterprise licensing plans. A $5 per user per month charge is actually an unusually low price for the enterprise SaaS market. In fact it’s even a low price for the individual developer market. Rarely does anything cost less than $9 per month...
Sorry but that is just a ridiculous criticism.
Saves time and breath. Also serves as a mini-tutorial on the utility of the wiki.