Yes, having documentation close to source code is bottom-up and being able to index this documentation somewhere is the top-down. Some documentation are useful to have in both ways and some are not. But if you force people to use a new tool to store their documentation, some will stop documenting and some will start, the best solution is to allow both ways but to index it in a central place without having to duplicate information.
> I have never found a good solution for architecting layered information for retrievablility, only least-worst hacks.
I don't know if we will end up in a 'good solution' situation, as that's quite a complex topic, but we try to approach the problem with different ideas in mind :
- A great user experience, how to encourage people to document and search in the documentation (I always joke that, a documentation platform is good only when all salespeople of a company use it everyday)
- Spreading the ownership of content organization, how we can rely on 1-2% of employees having 'expert' responsibilities to create the right framework to collaborate in his group
- Letting anyone curate information even on content they are not responsible of. As people that like documenting or care about it are not the same than the ones having expert knowledge on the topic.
At the end it's always difficult to discuss theory on those kind of topics as the only thing that counts is that it works in practice. And that's also why tools are important, they are able to hide the theory and let users use simple things