[yanis_t]

The biggest problem about knowledge management is that it gets stale pretty fast, and people don't see it as part of their job to keep it up to date.

That's more like organisational problem, but I'd wanted to tackle it from tech point of view, I would look into some mechanism that would ping people periodically to make them review and update their docs - email notifications, cross peer review, something along these lines.

[arnvald]

Exactly, whenever I join a new team or a company I go to read the docs, and then whenever I bring some questions people say "oh, that's outdated, none of it is relevant anymore".

Technology can support the efforts to keep docs updated, but as you say, organizations must recognize this as an important part of work and make sure that people take care of the docs.

[merrywhether]

In those instances, were the docs useful as a starting point or historical snapshot? Or would it have been better not to have wasted your time with them at all?

[sofixa]

IMHO the best way to tackle this for technical documentation is to keep it close to the code. It will then share the same lifecycle (code update without corresponding docs update shouldn't happen and should be enforced via reviews) and has a higher chance of staying up to date.

[sphldev]

Guru does this. Full disclosure I work for Guru. It's pretty interesting working for a knowledge management company and seeing this topic on the front page, then reading the comments describing exactly what we are working on.

[jtdev]

I'd argue that there's far too much documentation for documentation sake... nobody wants to spend valuable time updating a document that nobody looks at.

[toofy]

we all say this, and then we get annoyed because we’ve finally found a moment away from meetings to do our preferred work task, only to have a certain chunk of our valuable time being spent explaining something which could easily have its own document. then we rinse and repeat.