Throughout my career I kept noticing the same issue: the solution already existed, but nobody knew where it was.
Systems I have worked with
- Wiki platforms
- Issue trackers
- Document portals
- Internal knowledge bases
Every one of them can work, and every one of them can die. The technology was never what decided it.
What kills documentation systems
- Write-side friction - if capturing a solution takes more than a few minutes, it happens "later", which means never. The knowledge walks out of the building at the end of the shift.
- Read-side distrust - the first time someone follows a documented procedure and it is outdated, they stop reading documentation. One bad page poisons a hundred good ones.
- Organization-first thinking - long debates about the perfect category tree, while the actual content stays unwritten. People find documents by searching, not by browsing; the perfect hierarchy is mostly decoration.
- No owner - documentation without someone who feels responsible for it decays in about a year.
What the systems that survived had in common
- Writing a new page took under five minutes, from anywhere, with no template longer than three fields.
- Search was good enough that searching was faster than asking a colleague. That is the bar - documentation competes with shouting across the room.
- Pages recorded the problem as the person experienced it ("conveyor stops after E-stop reset"), not as the system categorizes it ("PLC fault code 0x2E"). People search with the words they have.
- Someone read new pages within a few days - light review, mostly to fix titles so future search would find them.
A simple habit that works
After every solved support case, one short page: symptom in the reporter's words, actual cause, fix, time spent. Two of those pages saved a four-hour repeat investigation within months - the same failure, found in thirty seconds of search. That single save justified a year of writing.
The lesson
Documentation only works when engineers actually use it. The best documentation system is simply the one people open.
The technical implementation matters. The process design matters even more.
This site itself is an attempt to live by that lesson: write things down so the next person (sometimes future me) solves the problem faster.