[clizzin]

Airbnb Engineering currently uses Hackpad (https://hackpad.com) for this purpose, and it's working very well. We previously used Google wikis and GitHub wikis, but the poor editing interface was enough of a barrier that few people contributed wiki content, preferring instead to send emails or just explain in person. Hackpad changed the game by making content creation dead simple. In addition, it has good search and organization capabilities.

In addition to canonical, long-lasting wiki content, we also use Hackpad for RFCs to the team (e.g. to gather opinions on the design of a new system or API) and checklists for ops events (e.g. migrating an RDS database to PIOPS). Hackpad's real-time collaborative nature works especially well for these use cases.

Whatever you choose, I submit to you that the most important thing is making it extremely easy to contribute content to that central knowledge repository. The ability to organize and format content nicely doesn't mean much if it's cumbersome to add new content in the first place.

[mkuhn]

Thank you for your reply, Hackpad does look very promising.

How do you make sure that documents get found and stuff does not get duplicated? Is there a central Place where you store links to important docs?

[clizzin]

Hackpad's search functionality is pretty good at ensuring that people find what they need. We do also maintain a Table of Contents pad, which serves as a central place that links to all our canonical content; this helps people find what they need by browsing. This ToC pad is pinned to the top of the Engineering Wiki collection.

One guiding principle we've followed is to favor long wiki articles so that it's easy to see a list of everything you can access from that one Table of Contents. Each pad is then well-organized so that you can search within the article to find what you need. We used to have lots of articles that each addressed just one thing, but that made it hard to locate the right article when you needed it.

Sometimes content gets duplicated, but we just clean that up when we notice it. So far it has not been a big deal.