This makes no sense given that you get the same payoff by using something like Atlassian's wiki. No git, no markdown, none of this nonsense, users can just immediately hit the ground running with advanced formatting support and version history.
I think you're lacking a lot of empathy for nontechnical users. I don't see how you could ever argue that your git + Obsidian stack is "more valuable" than an off-the-shelf wiki solution.
I have empathy for non technical people in that I believe Markdown is far easier to use than Atlassian's interface. Every single developer I've worked with has been tearing their hair out when trying to write documentation on Confluence and documentation never got written as a result. If this is the experience for technical people, what on earth is the experience like for non-technical people?
Nobody cares. Really, they do not. This doesn't help the business, it adds way too much overhead, and requires nontechnical people to understand markdown and git.
I have never heard nontechnical people complain about the Confluence wiki. From their perspective, everything Just Works. Imagine having to tell them all the things that they can't do because of Markdown's limitations, and how much harder it is to do drop-dead simple things like adding tables. Can't you see how that's a 100x higher barrier than anything you can complain about for Atlassian? Anything that you're frustrated at with their editor, you probably can't even do in Markdown. All the markdown stuff is easy.
This is where you lost me and probably many who are following your comments. I have never heard anyone express what you just did about Confluence.
I don't know what accounts for the difference between our experiences, but I work with many nontechnical people, and they have a much different opinion than those who you are listening to. I certainly have never heard anyone say that everything Just Works.
They absolutely care if one day Atlassian decides to hike prices to levels they deem unreasonable and now their entire documentation is locked in a proprietary format or if Atlassian go under, are purchased by a competitor etc.
> I have never heard nontechnical people complain about the Confluence wiki. From their perspective, everything Just Works.
This has not been my experience at all. I've had tons of business analysts join in the Confluence moaning during meetings, both for editing and trying to find stuff. 'Just works' is not how I or anyone I worked with would describe it.
>all the things that they can't do because of Markdown's limitations
what are these things you're so desperate to do in Code Documentation that you can't do in markdown?
> how much harder it is to do drop-dead simple things like adding tables.
This has been a solved problem for a while now. One of the very first Obsidian plugins was the advanced tables plugin which makes it super easy to make and edit tables. There's also other apps like Table Flip. I'm sure there's probably plugins for other editors like VS Code or Table functionality built in to other markdown editors.
The only reasonable point you've got is about git. Like I said in the original post, a WYSIWYG web interface for non-technical folks which just auto commits would be preferable whilst still allowing regular git and markdown for technical folks. There's also nothing stopping anyone from doing an intermediate page if conflicts are detected with a three way conflict resolution page a la Jetbrains Editors with a magic wand auto solve. Maybe the WYSIWYG editor could automatically update if changes are detected a la Google Docs. There are lots of potential ways of solving the 'git hard' issue. There is also the built in Obsidian Sync and Publish which use git behind the scenes and give you access to full version history although I don't know if they scale well or not.
At the end of day, conflicts in documentation are less of an issue when they do happen because they're not going to cause an entire crash of a program, you're just going to have some text that doesn't make sense. In the very worse case scenario non technical people could just copy and paste things back into place from git history. Other than time wasted, it's not the same disaster as if a code conflict is not resolved properly.
Except that like all WYSIWYG editors, Confluence's editor is buggy and unpredictable. You can only use it in a browser. Because it doesn't even have a 'raw' editing mode anymore, you can't work around the WYSIWYG editor when it's broken. Uploading or converting to it from external sources is a PITA, when it's even possible.
If you want technical documentation that developers are going to maintain, it has to be a joy to work with in their own editors.
WYSIWYG isn't actually better. It's a broken paradigm, and that's why every single attempt to move Wikipedia over to a WYSIWYG editor has failed.
Not what we're talking about here though, OP is suggesting it's reasonable to teach business analysts markdown and git for all company documentation.
