Confluence is the place all good ideas go to die

on daily, wiki, sharing, and information

For those who don’t know, Confluence is essentially a private wiki, with areas for different projects and other shared areas. It’s a commonly used tool but doesn’t seem effective at its job of sharing information.

Givers and Askers

There are two sides in the knowledge sharing game:

  • The knowledge givers (especially fascinating are project oracles, who seem to know everything there is to know).
  • The people asking for the knowledge.

Both sides have different goals when sharing information.

The givers (especially oracles) want details documented to allow people to find commonly requested information themselves, enabling the giver to focus on their own tasks. If they notice a common line of questions, they can create a page for that topic to refer to in the future when someone asks.

The askers normally have come up against a specific problem that they can’t figure out, or are missing a certain piece of knowledge. They want to find the specific answer quickly to their problem so they can continue with their task.

The mismatch

As a giver, it feels great to write a Confluence page. You imagine askers reading it and gaining understanding of the information you wish to share. However, including answers to many common questions makes it difficult for askers to easily find the specific knowledge they need.

Long form documentation is great for certain types of information, such as overviews of projects. For other information types they are not optimal, they are especially bad for quick questions as they are prone to having too much irrelevant (for the asker) information in them (see post on JIT knowledge). There are many document formats, each with their specific advantages. Checklists are great for allowing people to go through a process, in a repeatable manner. Q&A is great because it frames the question from the asker’s point of view.

These mismatches highlight different use cases for each side. They can compound on themselves, leading to the documents becoming stale and eventually dead.

Why do askers not read the wiki?

It’s pretty common for askers to not read a wiki, and I’ve been guilty of this myself. The list below contains some of the reasons why they don’t/why it’s a poor form of information sharing:

  • Long form documents take a large amount of time to parse, and internalise before working out if it’s relevant to your task. This means it tends to have a large barrier to entry.
  • Often pages don’t answer your specific question. The page covers that general area but not the specific knowledge needed. After this happens a few times, people are less likely to check the wiki, as they assume the knowledge isn’t there.
  • Searching is difficult, pages are often written without considering the questions askers would ask. When askers search, they may use different terms than those in the page.
  • Often pages contain lots of irrelevant facts that distract from the task at hand.
  • Pages can be out of date, describing process that is no longer correct.
  • The page can change after you’ve read it (you can receive notifications of changes, but these often become overwhelming).

All of these reasons make it cheaper for askers to simply message a giver directly. At worst, they receive a link to a Confluence page, which lets them avoid the search problem entirely.

What can we do?

I’m not sure if there is a good solution at the moment for sharing complex information when many types of information are being shared. The ideal solution would be as easy as asking a question to another human, leveraging our currently superior language processing abilities.

I’m not sure if a Q&A bot could address this. It would need to learn answers to questions and then repeat them back in a way that makes the information easy to parse, while providing links to longer-form documentation when relevant.

If you have any ideas please make it!