Knowledge, documentation and information management has also been one of my pet peeves for many years, and I’ve made some observations and conclusions on the way:
The problem has 80% to do with humans and 20% to do with technology. A lot of people have no sense of order and will just stick stuff wherever, never to be found again, making things quickly useless. A lot of people never bother to search or to look before asking questions, out of entitlement, lazynes, or because they’re used to search functions being bad. I agree that the search function in this forum (Discourse) is actually quite good and very usable.
Any software system dealing with knowledge, be it a forum, a wiki, a documentation system, needs a group of librarians. People who actually have a sense of order, memory and overview, and who can actually write. In here the closest thing is the moderators, but it can easily be established as a seperate role. It needs to be a very active role or things quickly scatter to the wind.
On the technology side most people forget that there’s two distinctly different kinds of knowledge and conversation: The temporary/ephemeral and then the permanent. Most modern and popular/widely used systems fall into the first category, like forums, facebook, twitter, discord, reddit, chat systems etc. They are only well suited for conversations, questions, answers, research of a fleeting and temporary nature, in the process of piecing things together and working things out, or simply sharing. They are very bad for capturing permament knowledge, which is part of the explanation of the seemingly chronic state of amnesia in society today.
The best type of system we have to capture permanent knowledge today is the Wiki, such as Wikipedia, and to a lesser extent systems like Stackoverflow and various CMS’s and document/knowledge management systems. Discourse/this forum has wiki functionality as well, but it works poorly because like any other post it quickly sinks to the bottom of the stack, and nobody notices pinned posts. A system for permanent knowledge has a somewhat rigid structure and content, that doesn’t change every day, and so makes it easy to quickly drill down for information. It also has a good search function.
The reason why capturing permanent knowledge is so important, when a project reaches a certain size, is to have a canonical resource to point to at all times, and to curb the endlessly answering of the same questions over and over, to great irritation. To capture and continually refine the best state of knowledge and documentation about any facet of the project. It represents the definitive and best obtainable documentation of all things related to the project.
The needed knowledge setup for a project like Rack is like this:
It has a system for temporary knowledge, conversations, sharing, questions and interactions - that’s this forum. It provides the whole dynamic nature of the ecosystem around the project and can be a great pleasure and very valuable.
And then it has a seperate system for capturing and exposing permanent knowledge. That would be the VCV Rack wiki, missing at https://wiki.vcvrack.com, that I would urge Andrew (@Vortico) to make at any time. I would nominate to use the MediaWiki platform also powering Wikipedia, which is excellent. That’s where you have the manuals, the guides, the FAQ’s about e.g. Rack and audio interfaces, etc. etc. All the knowledge that arises and decays on a daily basis on this forum, mostly kept somewhat alive by helpful old-timers. It is edited and curated by a group of trusted individuals, including foremost Andrew of course, with a sense of structure, order and detail, call it the librarians. They are already assembled here on this forum, believe me, and just need to be given the keys.
How the interplay between temporary and permanent knowledge works is like this: On the forum someone asks the same question for the hundredth time. The only response that’s needed is a link to the wiki where the answer is, in great depth, accuracy and detail, because it has accumulated and been refined over time. That keeps out 80% of the noise and polution on the forum. When someone surfaces a new interesting piece of knowledge, or opens a new area of problem or inquiry, a new page on the wiki is opened and the temporary, semi-chaotic knowledge starts to form and is transplanted piece by piece to a coherent piece of knowledge, permanently captured on the wiki, but ready to be updated and revised by the librarians at any moment, as new facts and pieces of the puzzle emerge.
Without a permanent knowledge system, good answers and knowledge will always be scattered, inaccurate, forgotten, and the same old questions, that have been answered countless times, will continue to be asked over and over again, and will be answered poorly and only semi-accurately. It’s a terrible waste of time and energy, bad business, with less happy users, and always produces sub-par knowledge and results.
Oh, and I would agree that this whole topic should be moved to the forum feedback category.