Internal Docs

Internal documentation is where organisational knowledge goes to either compound or decay, and which one happens is determined less by the tool than by whether anyone owns the content. The launches here cover wikis and knowledge bases, decision records, process documentation, onboarding material and the search layer that makes any of it findable.

The characteristic failure is entropy. A knowledge base grows, pages are added and never removed, half of them describe systems that no longer exist, and eventually people stop trusting it and ask a colleague instead — at which point the knowledge base is pure cost. Preventing this requires two mechanics: an owner for each page, and a review date after which it is either confirmed or archived. Tools that support both make the decay visible; tools that do not let it happen silently.

Search is the feature that determines whether documentation is used at all past a hundred pages, because nobody navigates a tree. Beyond good search, the strongest signal of a healthy internal wiki is that pages are findable by the words people actually use rather than the official terminology, which argues for redirects, aliases and a tolerance for informal titles.

Decision records are the most valuable and least common thing in this subcategory. A short document per significant decision — what was decided, what alternatives were considered, why, and what would cause a revisit — answers the question that costs organisations the most time, which is "why is it like this?". Six months later, nobody remembers, and without a record the choice gets relitigated or, worse, changed without knowing what it was protecting against.

Process documentation is worth writing only for processes that are stable and repeated. Documenting something that changes monthly produces a document that is wrong monthly. For fast-moving things, a recorded walkthrough with a date on it is more honest and cheaper.

On placement, documentation should live where the work is. Engineering documentation belongs in the repository. Company-wide material belongs in one place everyone can find. Splitting the same topic across three systems guarantees at least two of them are wrong.

The best test of internal documentation is handing a new starter a task and watching where they get stuck.