The GitHub wiki is an anti-pattern (2022)

Περίληψη

The “should I use the wiki or a docs folder on GitHub?” discussion comes up every 6 months or so, and following Shawn Wang’s three strikes rule I thought it was about time I wrote something down about it.

The initial version of this post opened with “You can use the wiki or a docs folder for your GitHub project, both are valid choices” but as I wrote more, I realised that there is a single reason to use a wiki, and many more reasons not to use the wiki. So many in fact, that I consider using the wiki on GitHub is an anti-pattern.

Let’s start with the benefits of using a wiki:

1. You can get to the wiki contents in a single click from anywhere in the repo
2. There is no 2.

Really, the only benefit that I’ve been able to find to using the wiki is that it’s always there.

How about the reasons not to use the wiki?

1. Documentation is versioned alongside your code whe...