The company wiki
Asking the wiki
Getting a sourced answer to 'why did we decide that?' instead of a search link.
You don't query the wiki. You ask Gini a question and it uses the wiki the way a colleague uses what they know.
Ask in your own words
@mention Gini anywhere, or ask in the web app:
- "Why do we bill on signup anniversary instead of the 1st?"
- "Who owns the data pipeline now?"
- "What did we decide about the Postgres migration?"
- "What does GRT stand for in #growth?"
- "How does the refund process work?"
No syntax, no keywords, no page names.
What a good answer looks like
You@Gini who owns the data pipeline now?
Gini
Sam Okafor, since 4 June: it moved from Priya when she took over billing.
Two caveats from the handover thread: Priya still owns the Airflow DAGs until the Q3 migration finishes, and anything touching the warehouse schema goes through Marcus for review.
Three things to notice. It's a specific answer, not a search result. It has a date, so you can tell how fresh it is. And it volunteers the complication. The caveats are usually the useful part, and they're what a search over documents would never surface.
When it doesn't know
Gini says so rather than guessing. Usually one of:
Nobody wrote it down and it wasn't decided in a channel Gini is in. The fix is inviting Gini to the channel where that kind of thing gets discussed.
It was decided before Gini arrived. Gini reads a channel's history when it joins, so this is rarer than you'd expect: but if the decision predates the channel, or lives in a doc, it's not there.
It's genuinely contested. Two threads say different things and nothing resolved it. Gini will show you both rather than picking, which is the right answer.
In all three cases, you can fix it in one message: tell Gini the answer and it writes it down.
Ask in the channel where the answer matters
Asking in the channel gives Gini that channel's context on top of the wiki, and it means everyone else in the room sees the answer too. That second effect is most of the value: the question rarely occurred to only one person.
Browsing instead
app.ginicomputer.com → Wiki, if you'd rather read than ask.
Good for onboarding: hand a new hire the wiki on day one and let them read for an hour. It's also the fastest way to notice that something's wrong, which is worth doing monthly.
The onboarding case
The highest-value use of the wiki is a person in their first month. They have a hundred questions, most of them small, and the cost of asking a colleague isn't the colleague's time: it's the new hire's reluctance to ask the same thing a third time.
Tell new people to ask Gini first. They'll ask more questions than they would have, get faster answers, and interrupt fewer people.