crimelabs786
commented
3 years ago Maintaining our own GitHub pages was getting cumbersome. We were this close to building our own custom CMS.
Having our own web presence, has its value. We can build custom experiences on top of that.
To justify the tech & engineering effort, we need decent content first. For the foreseeable future, we'd optimize and make it really easy for contributors to add high quality content and take it live on our wiki at the flip of a button.
Keeping these in mind, we've switched to Gitbook. This is our new Gitbook domain: https://indiainvestments.gitbook.io/content/
Value of great documentation that's easy to navigate, cannot be quantified. Plenty of startups & businesses have achieved diverse user-base on the backs of great knowledge base (KB).
DigitalOcean is an example of success, but Stripe & Algolia really kicked it up a notch. In fields of finance in India, ClearTax blog posts / documentations on all things tax, are referred to with no hesitation. Zerodha Varsity has become de facto first-read for every beginner in Indian markets.
Our long-term goal is to have a self-sustaining wiki that refers to external content less and less, over time.
Reddit as a wiki platform, is highly limiting.
In particular, we want these out of a wiki:
Beginner friendly 🔰
Do not assume the reader has any knowledge of the subject matter, instead provide all information as if they don't. Even if that means repeating some piece of information.
It should be easy to form a mental map of how things are structured, and what topic should come after a given topic. User should be able to easily bookmark, and consume on mobile. It should work with embedded web-browsers on Reddit apps / Discord / FB / Twitter etc.
A good wiki doesn't send users to chase 50 different URLs to other domains. People also don't tend to consume external content, hurts attention span.
Bundle
A bundle is like a module (Varsity lingo). Then why not just call it that? Because while in near future a bundle is a collection of some sections (like chapters); we plan on moving to add media (images / gifs / videos) and just programmable widgets in that (for example, an in-browser FD calculator).
These are must-have for a bundle:
Pre-requisite section 🚦
Before reading a bundle, what all other bundles or external resources (if any) should I cover or know about?
Goal of this bundle 🥅
After consuming this bundle, what can a reader do, that they couldn't do before? For instance, after reading a bundle on due diligence, am I able to some basic due diligence on my own?
Clear call-out for duration ⏲️
It's not nice to take up people's time, without giving them an idea upfront, how it'd affect their schedule / plans for the day. If a bundle would take 5 hrs to finish for average first time reader; let that be communicated upfront. Individual sections in the bundle can have their own duration field.
Simple lucid language ✍️
Nothing too fancy in terms of sentence constructs. Scientific rigor is important, but academic paper constructs are best avoided. Addressing reader as "you" is fine, no need to invoke passive forms.
At the other end of the spectrum, don't go overboard with emojis.
These are broad goals, that'd take us some time to achieve.
For now, in the short-term we want to focus on these bundles: