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Hi. I'm new to this list, but it seems to have a lot of great information.
I am working on launching a knowledge base. I have been trying to find out
some information on knowledge base design, but Google and Amazon have not
proven fruitful at all.
I have found a number of software packages to develop a knowledge base,
but that's not really what I'm looking for. Here, the technical side is
taken care of by our own proprietary applications.
I need answers to questions like these:
1. Is it better to have a lot of index entries or only a few? (I would
like to have a lot, but a number of people here want to limit index
entries pretty strictly).
2. Are users more likely to use the index search or the hierarchical
treeview to find an article?
3. Are there any guidelines for designing the hierarchical treeview?
4. Should the same article show up in different spots on the treeview?
(For example, assuming that I have four or five different applications
that all print documents, should a generic article on printing show up for
all of them?)
5. Is it useful to have a Getting Started section? What about tutorials?
And so on and so forth. (What makes this all even more complicated is that
I'm also supposed to be turning all of our documentation into
single-source at the same time I develop the Knowledge Base. And oh, yeah,
they want it all by Christmas.)
Does anyone know of any resources to help me with this task? Books,
articles, websites? I've been searching a lot the last couple of days, and
I haven't been able to find much at all.
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