Company knowledge base

A company knowledge base rarely dies for lack of tools. It dies because nobody owns the pages and they quietly go out of date. Here is how to set up a base that has owners, a history and a clear way to change it.

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In this article

What to put in first#

  • how the company works: teams, who is responsible for what, whom to ask about what;
  • policies and processes: time off, purchasing, access, shipping a release;
  • product guides for support and sales;
  • technical decisions and the reasons behind them;
  • answers to the questions newcomers ask most often.

Start with what people ask about most. A good first page is the one you have already pasted a link to in the chat three times.

Structure#

A section is a folder, a page is a markdown file. Splitting by audience works well: "Everyone", "Engineering", "Support", "Sales". In the root, a README with the table of contents.

Every page has an owner#

A CODEOWNERS file in the repository assigns the people responsible for each section: a change to "Policies" will not slip past the person who owns them. That gives each page an owner who keeps it from going stale.

Changes go through approval#

Important edits are proposed as pull requests. The section owner and colleagues see the before-and-after diff, comment, approve or request changes. After the merge the change lands in the main branch and stays in the history for good: you can always answer "when and why did this rule change?".

Access#

The base is a private organization repository. Access is granted to teams with roles: read, triage, write, maintain. The organization audit log shows who did what.

Limits worth knowing#

There is no full-text search across all pages yet — you navigate through tables of contents and links. There is no visual editor with macros — pages are written in markdown. There is no real-time co-editing. There are no email notifications — they arrive in the inbox on the site. If you are moving from a wiki tool, the Confluence alternative page covers the differences in detail.

Where to start#

Create an organization, a private "Knowledge base" repository, a README with a table of contents and a CODEOWNERS file. Ask every team to describe, within a week, the three questions they get most often — and the base will start answering real questions straight away. For onboarding material, see the employee knowledge base page.

Try it on your own task

Create a repository — history, issues and pull requests from day one.

Create a repository

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Personal knowledge base A personal knowledge base is not an archive of everything you have read. It is a set of your own notes, linked to each other, that you keep coming back to. Here is how to set one up so it works instead of turning into a dump of links. Employee knowledge base An employee knowledge base solves one problem — a new person finds the answer alone without distracting colleagues. A huge encyclopedia does not do that well. A clear route does — what to read on day one, what in the first week, and how to check that it all makes sense. Confluence alternative Confluence keeps documentation as pages inside spaces. In Skillok documentation is a set of markdown files in a repository, and you work with it the way you work with code — edit, history, review. That is stricter and more transparent, but there is no visual page builder and no real-time co-editing. GitHub alternative Skillok is built like GitHub and repeats the familiar parts — repository, commits, branches, issues, pull requests, projects, organizations. The interface is available in English and Russian. Below is an honest list of what already works, what does not yet, and how to move your code in a few minutes. Notion alternative Notion is built from page blocks and databases. Skillok works differently — your notes are plain markdown files in a repository, and every change has a history. If you care about text, order and being able to take everything with you at any moment, this may suit you better. If you need database tables with formulas and real-time co-editing, it will not. GitLab alternative If you use GitLab for repositories, issues and code review, and do not want to maintain a server, Skillok covers that part. If you live in GitLab CI and the package registry — honestly, that is not us yet. Here is what matches and what does not.

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