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Comment by y2bd | Hacker News Reader

There are two ways that I interpret this

* What’s being written down isn’t valuable, so people don’t trust the wiki to have valuable information and therefore ignore it.

* What’s being written down is valuable, but people have been trained to get information elsewhere and therefore don’t bother going to the wiki

I don’t really know how to address the former (“write better!” isn’t very actionable advice), but in my work I see the latter a lot, and the only way you can fix it is socially—if someone asks you a question that’s answered in the wiki, you have to tell them “read the wiki” instead of giving them the answer yourself.

People are lazy, and it’s almost always easier in the short term to just ask someone for the answer instead of looking it up yourself.

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If we get better search systems I would be totally on board. But most knowledge base systems have a hard time finding similes for words let alone sorting articles containing multiple keywords in a useful order.

Having the information written down is important if nothing else than a source of reasoning going forward (people tend to remember do X but rarely why in my experience). However saying that asking a coworker is a bad thing is giving way too much credit to the documentation.

Additionally if you are talking about anything but the most basic associations talking with people is a good thing anyway as you can discuss your idea and see if there are problems the documentation couldn't tell you about because said problem would be listed in a different place.

Sure, I should make clear: documentation/wikis are best for who/what/when/where of things like

- What permissions do I need to contribute code to this repo

- Where are the telemetry tables for X event

- Who’s the manager for project Y

- When will my commit make it into production

For the whys and hows that often warrant discussion, while I still think you should have basics documented (How do I add a new screen to this app, why do we call into this proxy service, etc) so that folks have a starting place, and then pursue actual discussion.

Even if the wikis are literally just the most basic associations, I still believe that would clear up a ton of repeated and honestly unproductive discussion time.

I've had a funny observation over the years. The more refined the wiki, the worse the code/ops are.

Good ops and code are usually to some extent self-documenting. If you had a wiki with 20 steps to perform some task, maybe the answer is that the process needs to be simplified.

I've noticed it a lot of times in legacy systems. There's often a page with 20 different idiosyncrasies that you have to deal with, and the code is too critical to update even with comments

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