The GitHub wiki is an anti-pattern (2022)

stephenlf

I agree with this post. I’ve never found the GitHub wiki experience to be particularly ergonomic. I don’t have any issues with it, but it’s no more convenient than a simple /docs folder. And from there, it’s almost trivial to turn /docs into GitHub pages. Similar effort for a much better end product. Wikis typically connote distributed, anonymous edits. This feature is partially covered by git already.

hn1rig3rak

Biggest thing for me is wiki edits skip code review, so docs rot silently while a /docs PR at least shows up in the diff next to the change.

chungy

Fossil ( https://fossil-scm.org/home/doc/trunk/www/index.wiki ) solves this pretty nicely. You can have documentation as files or in a special wiki namespace and it's versioned both ways, and every repository clone gets everything. Even better than that, your in-tree documentation files are rendered and browseable in exactly the same way as the dedicated wiki namespace. The linked URL to the home page there can even serve as an example: the "trunk" is a check-in name ( https://fossil-scm.org/home/doc/trunk/www/checkin_names.wiki ) that points to the newest check-in on the "trunk" branch. You can replace it with any other reference to get the old version; eg, version-2.20 would work to get the version 2.20 of the docs, 2015-03-14 would work to get the version from 14 March 2015, etc.

bocklund

Interesting because I just added a wiki for one of my projects. I'm not using it for docs, since the project already has in-tree docs. I'm using it more as a public scratchpad of ideas / experiments to try that aren't well-defined enough (or known to be worth) opening as an issue yet.

mikeocool

In my experience, the docs for something like setting up a dev env are typically greatly improved by the second person who sets up the dev env, not the personal who originally wrote the docs. In that case, when the docs are not associated with a code change, you want to make getting those improvements into the docs as frictionless as possible, otherwise the changes aren't going to get made. Personally, I've found that making docs updates incredibly fast + easy to be far more valuable than anything you get from forcing doc changes through the full SDLC process. If someone has feedback on your docs changes they would have shared in a review, they can just update the docs instead.

jdxcode

i was going to say the biggest reason wasn't mentioned here, that github sets Disallow: /*/wiki* however I think maybe this has changed? I don't see it in https://github.com/robots.txt now

_itsRoze

It's likely also better that agents seeing versioned /docs can understand the context of changes to the codebase better.

knose

nit: ”Using the /docs folder is the highest effort-to-reward ratio option” shouldn’t it be lowest or reward-to-effort instead?

ierukah

In Forgejo, wikis are just another repo, so you have versioning there.

shevy-java

The Github wiki is pretty bad. However had, it is easier to use than issues and coordinating them. Github issues require too much cross-communication and not everyone has the time to meta-coordinate many different issues in many different projects. A wiki lowers the entry-barrier too, so the idea of a wiki is, in principle, good. If I were Github I would improve the wiki, a bit stylistically, to make it more visually pleasing to use (but not much, those designers always go overboard when making changes in my experience), but much more importantly so, to make the wiki a more flexible addition, including API-wise, usage examples, documentation and so forth. People can, in principle, do so on their own, but also from experience, most people stop doing so after a while, and then the wiki decays into outdated information. That's bad too. Spawning more issues to manage the wiki also does not work well.

preisschild

In Gitlab the wiki is just a separate git repo. Is this not the case with GitHub?

a1o

I really wanted the wiki to at minimum have directories so they would be easier to structure and allow even for major versions that are maintained in parallel.

a4isms

The second paragraph neatly triggered my confirmation bias: The initial version of this post opened with “You can use the wiki or a docs folder for your GitHub project, both are valid choices” but as I wrote more, I realised that there is a single reason to use a wiki, and many more reasons not to use the wiki. So many in fact, that I consider using the wiki on GitHub is an anti-pattern. A very straightforward example of McCulloch's quote that "Writing is thinking."

esafak

Yes, and the rest of it is too; there's another outage today and my CI is blocked. I guess I can read the wikis while I wait, eh?? https://www.githubstatus.com/

00kee0d

You own it now, I'll quote you on that!

ghusto

I've never understood why people even _generate_ from the docs folder. If you've written it in markdown (which they nearly always do) then it's already rendered properly in Github. Or is it because they then publish those docs somewhere else?

sholladay

A lot of GitHub’s secondary features are like this. The Issues tab and Discussions tab are so similar, with slightly different feature sets. And users will happily use both for feature requests and bug reports, with varying degrees of quality, so then I just have yet another thing to stay on top of. I think Discussions were made to reduce noise in very busy repos, but I generally find something useful in the noise. It’s really just a way to ignore users. As a result, I always turn off Discussions and just let people file issues when they feel it’s appropriate.

jjice

I agree, but my only gripe is I hate the ceremony required for doc-only updates. It needs a review and CI. The review is a good thing in most cases (want your docs to be correct), but that often takes my team like two days (I'm realizing this is likely our fault now that I'm typing this). For CI, I've just added in a step to all our GitHub actions to skip Markdown only changes. Anyone have any better ideas?