Open-source Project Wikis

Since its invention, the wiki has been an excellent tool to collectively gather loose information easily. Since the major project sites (e.g. SourceForge, GitHub) provide them, there’s been a trend for open-source projects to use wikis for documentation. Since wikis are so easy to add to, clearly this has solved the Open-Source documentation problem, right?

For every exemplary project wiki, there’s dozens of project wikis that are minefields of outdated and incorrect information. Technical documentation is hard to do, and a wiki doesn’t necessarily reveal where the information you need will be, or if it will be there at all. Good documentation has structure, and while you can superficially create structure with a wiki, it’s not a built-in mechanism.

Projects need documentation for standard installation instructions, basic how-to-use, and instructions on where to send bug fixes and questions. It would be nice to see something which created this automatically.