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Learn Documenting / Introduction

The ability to create effective documentation is one of the most important skills for anyone working with information. Documentation serves the following purposes:

  1. Memorializes information so that it is not lost.
  2. Provides details about data, processes, software, and other technical topics (as well as any topic).
  3. Allows information to be shared between individual and organizational entities.
  4. Provides context at various levels (overview, details, etc.).
  5. Provides a product that can be reviewed, which allows for improvements in the documentation and the topics it discusses.
  6. Through its creation, causes the author to understand and examine the quality of work products.

A lack of documentation, or bad/inaccurate documentation can greatly hamper one's ability to use previously-created work products and technologies, which if not understood can lead to inefficiency, ineffectiveness, and "reinventing the wheel".

This documentation seeks to educate about creating effective documentation, in particular to help select appropriate software tools, formats, and web platforms for documentation. Reducing barriers to creating effective documentation can then lead to actually creating documentation. The documentation can then be used, reused, updated, improved, distributed, etc.

Next Steps

The next sections of this documentation provide guidelines for creating documentation for various work products (datasets, processes, software). Those sections refer to specific technologies as needed.