[1123581321]

Users like outline trees. Trees communicate a lot more information about what the project does and what systems or features support what.

Wiki linking, in that case, is just an alternative way to duplicate the content of a page on the tree. Other methods include redirects and using software that can symlink individual blocks of text to keep them in sync.

As to why documentation is bad, it's because people close to a project are not in a good position to communicate about it. Absent a large, self-documenting community, the best solution is to either have documentation be done by an employee who is a power user or customer of the system, who writes well, or by taking developers off production duty to do nothing but provide support to users and structure them into general answers and explanations.

[webmaven]

> using software that can symlink individual blocks of text to keep them in sync.

I've usually seen those called transclusions. Occasionally someone reinvents the idea and comes up with some other neologism, often based on the word 'quote' (eg. superquote, hyperquote, etc.).