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September 01, 2004

What is documentation?

A search for define:documentation at Google, returns many definitions, one of which seems wide enough to fit the whole thing:

(2) Instructions or descriptive information about a product or program.

It turns out we have evidence that readers consider anything they can get their hands on describing a product or program or how to use one as documentation. We do not seem organizationally to have figured out what this says about how we ought to work and what we ought to deliver, probably because this implies everybody writing mail is potentially creating documentation.

We put pressure on ourselves to publish as little noise as possible. Yet, the higher you set your standards to filter noise, the more likely you are to filter out relevant information. Also, if those producing the "noise-free" information have less of a clue than those generating "noisy" information, you end up with a situation where readers prefer noisy information channels to which they can apply their own filters (such as Google).

What does it all mean? Maybe we could save our readers trouble by doing 3 things simultaneously:

  1. Scale back traditional documentation production to installation, migration, thorough reference, and troubleshooting
  2. Turn up the noise to "publish" everything we know would fit the readers' definitions of documentation, leaving the filtering to readers; facilitate generation of good noise around the product
  3. Focus documentation resource on improving writeups for heavily accessed noises, and for documentation customers are literally willing to pay for

This implies a much more reactive documentation effort than anything we've done so far. It also assumes we can make the measurements we need.

It does mean doing the bulk of the documentation work needed couldn't happen by design without real reader involvement, since what we document lastingly would be what people are trying to read about. It might reduce the complaints about lack of customer feedback.

Posted by Mark at September 1, 2004 06:57 AM