Kaitlyn Tierney at StaffPlus London 2023
summary
Argues that applying librarian practices produces a usable engineering Wiki: backup existing docs, prune ephemera, create a taxonomy, seed Evergreen pages, add metadata and a finding Aid, and make content searchable. Recommends tools tried: Notion for collaborative, link-safe pages and occasionally GitHub Wiki; automates indexing for incident reviews into a searchable post incident review database. Reports that a seeded Wiki attracts contributors, supported a regulatory submission, and that missing QA docs once caused a rollout with measurable commercial impact.
AI-written summary · about
chapters (11)
- 0:00Introduction
- 3:07Shared goals librarians engineers
- 5:15Assessing existing docs
- 8:05Taxonomy for Wiki
- 10:13Consistent Wiki pages
- 12:02Easy searchable docs
- 14:33Choosing Wiki tool
- 16:41Collaborative docs culture
- 19:27Launching Wiki steps
- 20:30Docs success examples
- 22:18Poor docs risks next steps
related talks
42mEngineering Documentation
40mAll together now: Turning technologists into documentarians
35mHow Reference Librarians Can Help Us Help Each Other
39mLower the Barrier of Entry: Empowering Non-writer Contributions To Docs
26mCompiled Knowledge for Agentic APIs: Why Your Agents Need a Wiki, Not Just RAG
27mThe art and practice of documentation triage
43mDigital Knowledge Management for Individuals and Teams
38mThe Stuff You Don't Want to Write... Documentation