Toolkit, EHR, organizational, informational or otherwise, I think all documentation has the same needs, and can use the same throughput.
Wikis stink. Delving data is hard enough, and most people simply use a search engine to get information out of them. Some folks can’t see why this is a problem. That is because they know what they are looking for, and have a term to describe it. The users go to documentation not knowing what they should be looking for. They need a lot of options in front of their face so they can delve into categories in a linear fashion. Search based documentation is inherently silly. If you know what you are looking for, you probably already know some of it…and you must.
It would be great to have a documentation workflow that:
Is a collaboration package that tracks changes much like a repo.
Can set editing permissions (CANNOT be an open wiki!) and has an authorization system that accounts for standardizing terminology and formatting.
Can output to a traditional manual, a tree menu driven system, and even out to a wiki or whatever if it must.
There are very few examples of good on-line documentation out there. The slick mobile stuff (think Microsoft Support) is mostly useless to a noob.
Collections of data like this forum are also not so great. When you sign on here, you get a chronological list of activity, then you can sort it by tags etc… but it is very difficult to use anything here as a reference. This is easily exemplified by a recent question “Can you point me to the documentation?”. There was no documentation, but the layout did not make it readily apparent that it did not exist.
Recently, one of projects I have long used called “PDFSam” switched from a PHPBB forum for documentation to something new and slick. It is useless. Before, you could go there, look at it and say, “Uh, seems like I don’t have the current version, but I need support for it. Looks like there is a legacy support section with my version on it. OK, well, look there; It’s got the configuration help in there. I think that is what I need…” Successful use. You are now required to spend about 15 minutes and know exactly what you are looking for, then it has to refer you to the hidden link to original board, because all the people that used to post there have stopped, and there are no new posts or contributions.
Here is a terrible use of PHPBB as product documentation. https://community.apachefriends.org/f/
All the same, you can still go right where you need by glancing down the well ordered items on the screen.
Here is a pretty good one: http://www.phphelp.com/forum/index.php
Here is an excellent one, though it still only uses a couple of levels of sub categories: http://www.orbiter-forum.com/
If three or four levels were used, someone could navigate to exactly what they want without knowing what it is called, in very short order.