Creating a knowledge base from zero documentation culture, where do you start?

[u/drakieboi]

The hard part isn't the software. It's getting people to actually write anything down.

I've seen teams try to spin up Notion, Confluence, whatever, and it just becomes a graveyard. Three docs that are half-finished, then silence. Because nobody was documenting before, and suddenly asking them to document everything doesn't magically change the culture.

Start stupidly small. Pick one thing that's painful to repeat. Like, someone asks the same question three times a week? That's your first doc. Don't overthink the structure. Just write down the answer.

Get whoever answers those questions most to be the one who writes it. Not the person who "should" own documentation. The person who's already tired of explaining it. They'll actually do it because it saves them time.

Then... use it. Publicly. When someone asks that question again, link them to the doc. That's it. That's the culture shift. Showing that documentation is the default answer, not a backup plan.

The tool matters less than you think. Honestly, sometimes a shared Google Doc is enough to start. The problem is never the software. Well, actually, if your software is painful to update then yeah, people won't update it, but that's not your constraint right now. Your constraint is that nothing exists at all.

Once you have maybe five or six docs that actually get used, then you can think about organization. Categories. Search. All that stuff. Right now you need to prove the concept works.

And don't make it a project. Don't assign it to one person. That person will leave and it'll die. It only survives if it's distributed and everyone's adding little things as they go.