99% of people on the Internet are lurkers, and only 1% actually contribute anything ever. By defaulting to action, you can quickly end up wielding a disproportionate amount of influence on the resulting culture of your org. So, not a methodology, but an algorithm I often follow:
If I need to do a thing, and I don't know how to do it, I search for the most obvious sequence of words I can thing that is vaguely like my problem in Confluence. I do this maybe 3 to 5 times.
If I find something, I open it in edit mode and start reading through it. The instant I hit upon anything not obvious to me, add whatever obvious thing is missing.
If I don't find anything in there, I create a page in the Diataxis format (usually a HOWTO) and write it myself. I use short sentences, plenty of screenshots, and plenty of code blocks, to make it as copy-and-paste friendly as possible.
I never ask just how basic this thing actually is - most of my most viewed articles in any organization turn out to be the most basic ones. "How to make a network drive in Windows." "How to set up your Git credentials." These are very often much more popular than "How to build a custom VM inmage with QEMU and Ansible." I take my own confusion as an existence proof that this is sufficiently obscure enough to confuse one generally competent but non-expert person, and take faith that most people in my org are not experts in most things.
I trust other people to be able to look at the timestamps and the history of the docs and to figure out whether what they're reading is too outdated to be useful. I pretend, despite evidence to the contrary, that other people will follow roughly the same algorithm as me, and read pages and make updates on the fly as they work. If they don't, well, that's them ceding their cultural power, which they probably don't want anyway (and that is entirely fair).
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99% of people on the Internet are lurkers, and only 1% actually contribute anything ever. By defaulting to action, you can quickly end up wielding a disproportionate amount of influence on the resulting culture of your org. So, not a methodology, but an algorithm I often follow:
If I need to do a thing, and I don't know how to do it, I search for the most obvious sequence of words I can thing that is vaguely like my problem in Confluence. I do this maybe 3 to 5 times.
If I find something, I open it in edit mode and start reading through it. The instant I hit upon anything not obvious to me, add whatever obvious thing is missing.
If I don't find anything in there, I create a page in the Diataxis format (usually a HOWTO) and write it myself. I use short sentences, plenty of screenshots, and plenty of code blocks, to make it as copy-and-paste friendly as possible.
I never ask just how basic this thing actually is - most of my most viewed articles in any organization turn out to be the most basic ones. "How to make a network drive in Windows." "How to set up your Git credentials." These are very often much more popular than "How to build a custom VM inmage with QEMU and Ansible." I take my own confusion as an existence proof that this is sufficiently obscure enough to confuse one generally competent but non-expert person, and take faith that most people in my org are not experts in most things.
I trust other people to be able to look at the timestamps and the history of the docs and to figure out whether what they're reading is too outdated to be useful. I pretend, despite evidence to the contrary, that other people will follow roughly the same algorithm as me, and read pages and make updates on the fly as they work. If they don't, well, that's them ceding their cultural power, which they probably don't want anyway (and that is entirely fair).