Documentation is always the worst part of any software development project.  The Agile guys believe that code should speak for itself.  While that's enough for many people and enough for many snippets of code, it's not always quite enough for all of the right people.

I believe firmly that the ease at which a new person can approach a piece of software demonstrates the community's overall maturity.  The Java community (in aggregate) has an impressive amount of documentation on its libraries.  The creation and standardization of JavaDoc led to much of that, but it still takes a bit of effort from the developers and the community.    

Most mISV's don't need to worry about these aspects. When you're only one person, a great big file or a whiteboard or any number of other tools can probably fit your needs. But once you add a second person or a second project/product, it gets that much more complicated. Now your mnemonics and half-notes aren't as valuable... in fact, some may be a liability.

Hello, I'm Keith and I'm an information addict. I don't seek to catalog all the world's information. I don't even seek to collect it. My goal is to take what I have and make it useful.

That may sound odd but think about it... most information has a few specific properties:

• The most important/expensive information is usually the most time-sensitive;
• It isn't useful if you don't know how to find it;
• Different people will look for the information in different ways depending on the questions they need answered;

Towards this goal, I've been experimenting with different wiki structures - exclusively on MediaWiki - and how to use them to fulfill those requirements. Here are the results of a year of tweaking and refinement.