Can this do what SharePoint and private wikis can't? My team has tried both with varying degrees of success. In my experience it's always just "easier" for people to pester those who should know the answers.
Come over and ask me something I know is in the wikki? Let's sit down and search the wikki together. No match? Then let's type up a result together and enter it for future use.
You can't fix a bad process with a magic app, but a magic app can help a process work much better.
Both of those are much more "free form". You have to put effort in to get some value out. That's before you think of culture, and for it to be the norm for people to use those tools. SO has structure for Q&A which solves the technical issue, but it still doesn't solve the cultural aspect.
Does pestering being "easier" reflect a deeper problem? Maybe, maybe not, but in a lot of places people get annoyed having to answer the same question over and over. Committing answers to writing also helps clarify them and avoids someone walking off with institutional knowledge. In theory, that improves things.
>In my experience it's always just "easier" for people to pester those who should know the answers.
Your intuition is probably correct. It's interesting why private corporate wikis and other "knowledge management"/"corporate intelligence" systems fail to live up to the vendors' promises while public crowdsourced volunteer efforts like wikipedia.org and stackoverflow succeed. They have different social dynamics that software tools don't really solve:
1) Venn diagram intersection of typers & searchers is too small a quantity. The # of employees who will type out quality answers (typers) and # of employees who will search databases for answers (and attempting different keywords/synonyms when they initially get "0 results found") is too small to make internal knowledge databases flourish. Yes, the % of contributors[1] to wikipedia and stackoverflow is also less than 1% compared to lurkers but since that 1% in absolute numbers is much higher (e.g. 100,000+), that's enough to keep up the quality content on those websites.
2) out-of-band questions/answers that happen outside of the Q&A database. E.g. Bob catches Alice in the hallway as she heads out to lunch and asks her why WidgetX has foobarY and she can answers it on the spot. Neither are going to disrupt their motions so both can go sit down at a keyboard and type out the same Q&A again. Same situation with questions popping up on Slack or conference calls. Compare that in-office dynamic with remote Stackoverflow contributers[2]. You don't have those experts walking around your hallways so you must use stackoverflow to type out the questions. There are no out-of-band communication channels. This constraint adds to the quantity of content.
3) secretarial/administrative/housekeeping curation. Much of the usefulness of wikipedia & stackoverflow is the ability to ask questions in different ways with different wording but still end up at the optimal canonical answer. This happens because the community continually ads relevant "tags" to questions, flags duplicates (that had different wording) & point them to previous answers, and adds comments to old answers to signify they are obsolete. This makes the cross-referencing index of those public websites very good. In contrasts, corporate wikis usually have no full-time admin to continuously enhance the cross-references. Therefore, if a new employee doesn't know the exact magic words to ask a question, they'll get "0 results found".
If the underlying problem is people dynamics and incentives, it's very hard for software tools of any kind to solve that.
At one of the Big 4 firms, managers tried to incentivize contributions to the "knowledge database" by tying it to annual performance reviews. Guess what happened? At the end of the year, the database gets flooded with crap articles (e.g. Powerpoints and proposals for specific customers) uploaded to the db to get that requirement checked off. That type of useless content would be quickly deleted by admins on wikipedia and stackoverflow.
The combination of all the factors above results in corporate wikis being either 1) a barren wasteland or 2) a dumping ground for useless content.
I prefer VSC too, but no harm in trying out the improvements in Atom.
There's one feature/plugin in Atom that I wish VSC had, which is browser-plus. I haven't found anything comparable in VSC, which is a shame as it'd be useful when iterating through website designs.
It's not the "feds" like the federal government -- it's the "Fed" which is short for Federal Reserve Bank. The Fed is not part of the government. It's as "federal" as Federal Express. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1pVV4n2lKHk
That's not really correct. The Federal Reserve's Board of Governors are appointed by the President and confirmed by the Senate. More than half of the members of its Federal Open Market Committee come from the Board of Governors (and so are Presidential appointees).
The Federal Reserve is not a normal government agency, but neither is it a non-government entity like Federal Express. It is something in between.
The libertarian and gold bug stuff about the Fed actually being a secret private bank drives me wild. I think it's because the shriven government does so little, in terms of producing and not redistribution compared to other nations.
I mean there's all kinds of arms length government agencies. There's state broadcasters like the CBC or BBC with similar independent board of governors/directors. The Illinois Department of Financial and Professional Regulation's Real Estate Disciplinary and Enforcement Boards is something like half real estate professionals as provided by law. There's sewage districts and stuff that nobody knows about with taxation powers and independent election of leaders are they private? It's such a weird meme to have such persistence, especially among techies.
I do like sending and receiving letters because they are personal. The envelope is hand-written and the correspondence is, too. Machine created snail mail kind of defeats its own purpose.
