You can teach someone the mechanics of a knowledge base in an afternoon.
Spaces, page templates, permissions, a sensible folder structure.
Within a few weeks, a capable person can build something that looks organised, professional, ready to fill.
That’s the easy 20%.
The other 80% is getting the actual content out of engineers, SMEs, business owners, none of whom have time, none of whom think what they know is worth writing down.
The platform was never the scarce skill.
Extraction is.
🧠 Why the content is harder to get than the structure
A knowledge base is only as good as what people are willing to tell you.
That’s the entire constraint, plus it’s a human one, not a technical one.
An engineer with 40 meetings a week isn’t going to sit down and write an article.
A business owner who’s been burned by a previous documentation project isn’t going to hand over their process willingly.
A tenured expert doesn’t think what they know is remarkable, so they leave out exactly the details a new starter needs most.
None of that gets fixed by a better wiki template.
It gets fixed by knowing how to talk to each of those people differently.
👨💻 Getting information out of technical people
Engineers, developers, system administrators respond badly to being asked to write.
They respond well to being asked to explain.
- Ask them to walk you through the last time they did the thing, not the theory of it
- Record the conversation, then write it up yourself, never ask them to draft it
- Bring a rough technical understanding beforehand, so you’re asking them to correct you
- Ask what breaks, since technical people love explaining failure modes
- Keep sessions to 20 minutes, since attention drops fast once the interesting part is covered
That third point changes the whole dynamic.
Turning up already knowing roughly how the system works means you’re not asking them to educate you from zero.
You’re asking them to fix your understanding, which takes a fraction of the time plus feels far less like a chore.
🧑💼 Getting information out of business people
Business owners guard their process for different reasons.
Sometimes it’s time.
Often it’s politics, since documenting a process can feel like exposing how much slack sits in it, or how much depends on 1 person.
- Lead with what’s in it for them, since a documented process protects them when they’re on leave
- Ask about pain first, not the happy path, since people talk more freely about frustration
- Never document something that makes a team look bad without checking with them first
- Frame the exercise as capturing their expertise, not auditing their performance
- Give credit publicly for what they contributed
That last point does more for future cooperation than anything else on this list.
Someone who sees their name attached to a well-used article becomes an advocate rather than a reluctant source.
🔬 Getting information out of subject matter experts
SMEs sit somewhere between the two.
Deep expertise, often less confident that anyone else needs it explained.
- Ask what a new starter gets wrong, since that reveals the gaps immediately
- Get them talking about an edge case, since experts light up on the unusual rather than the routine
- Never let a written contribution sit unattributed, since anonymity kills motivation to contribute again
- Bring a draft built from whatever exists already, then ask them to correct it
- Follow up individually with anyone who went quiet in a group session
Correcting is always faster than creating.
If you can get 70% of an article right from existing material, most SMEs will happily fix the remaining 30% in 10 minutes.
Ask them to write the whole thing from scratch, you’ll wait 6 weeks, or forever.
🔁 The habit that works across all 3 groups
One technique earns its place regardless of who you’re talking to.
When someone gives you a thin answer, repeat their last few words back as a question, then say nothing.
“It just goes to the second system automatically.”
“Automatically?”
Then wait.
Almost everyone fills the silence with the detail you actually needed.
Works on engineers explaining an integration, business owners describing a handoff, SMEs walking through an exception.
The pause is doing the work, not the question.
🗣️ Handling the people who won’t contribute
Some people never will, no matter the approach.
A few ways to work around that rather than through it.
- Find who else does the same work, then go to them instead
- Interview the newest team member, since they still remember what confused them
- Watch the work happen rather than asking about it, if observation is possible
- Accept a partial article now, flagged for review, rather than nothing while you wait
An incomplete article marked as a draft, visibly owned, beats an empty knowledge base every time.
✅ Where it lands
Structuring a knowledge base is a skill anyone competent can pick up quickly.
Filling it with content worth reading depends entirely on whether you can get busy, guarded, or simply modest people to hand over what they know.
That’s not a platform problem.
It’s the same skill that makes a good process analyst good, applied to a different artefact.
Rapport first, specific questions second, credit given generously, always.
Get that right, then the wiki structure barely matters.
Get it wrong, then the best information architecture in the world is sitting on top of nothing.
About the author
Aiver Ilaya is an IT consultant based in Melbourne. For 19 years he’s worked on enterprise digital transformation programs. His experience spans ITSM, HRIS, ERP, CRM, POS, KMS and EDRMS platforms, plus workflow automation. He has worked across government, healthcare, science and medical research, finance, education, telecommunications, infrastructure, aviation, construction and property, technology, retail, logistics, pharmacy, insurance and professional services.
His work covers business analysis, process optimisation, technical writing, knowledge management and UI / UX design. He has worked on multi-million dollar programs running years at a time, for national organisations and global firms, reaching millions of end users.
He has run his own consultancy for 12 years and works with a small number of clients at a time. Available for remote and hybrid contracts.
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