About
Description of the knowledge-base, and how to to add to it and improve it.
Who is this for?
Anyone who needs to use the knowledge-base and wants to understand how it works, in particular anyone who wants to add information to the knowledge-base, or improve the information that is already there.
Introduction
The knowledge base is an easy-to-find collection of important forum topics, which is displayed without clutter. The topics that are selected to be shown is defined by category and/or tag. This provided through the discourse docs plugin.
The knowledge base is viewable here:
https://forum.access-hive.org.au/docs
That link is also discoverable through the main navigation menu under Docs
What should be added to the knowledge base?
Topics that have general utility for a wider audience. Known bugs or issues and their solution or work-around are good examples. These may be topics that will be added to formal documentation in the future, so the knowledge base will make them easier to locate, but in the mean time they are still findable and useful to the community.
Anything that has the tag #knowledge-base is shown in the knowledge base.
How should a topic be added to the knowledge base?
Any topic can be added to the knowledge base by adding the #knowledge-base tag. If a topic is of sufficient interest then this is the first step. The topic should either be self-contained so that all information is available in the top post, or if it is a question a solution should be selected so that it also appears in the knowledge base.
If the topic is not well described in the top post, and there is important information in the replies, consider creating a new topic summarising the information and link back to the original topic.
If you are unsure if the topic needs to be improved or should even be in the knowledge-base, add a #needs-review tag. There is currently no defined review process. The community will need to decide how to resource this: it will require some commitment from the community to get the necessary scale and topic coverage.
Ideally all knowledge-base topics should be periodically reviewed to make sure they’re up to date with the most current knowledge, but again there is no defined process for this to happen.
All knowledge-base articles should have sufficient meta-data, in the form of tags and any other relevant information. If the topic is describing a bug, or other issue the meta-data must be sufficient to fully describe the problem, when and were it is encountered and the appropriate solution.
In the future there will be a topic template available to assist with creating knowledge-base topics.