Every company wants to believe their internal documentation is clean, comprehensive, and always up to date. Almost every company I worked at at least felt like they had a great internal wiki. But let’s be honest: most internal wikis are a mess.

Half-written guides, outdated SOPs, "draft" pages from six months ago, broken links, and comments like "needs update" or "@someone please fix." Sound familiar?

It’s not because people don’t care. It’s because creating and maintaining documentation is hard, thankless, and rarely prioritized when you're trying to hit your revenue goals.

The Promise of Wikis

Wikis were supposed to save us.

They were introduced as the ultimate solution to scattered knowledge, inconsistent onboarding, and repeated questions across teams. A single source of truth that anyone could edit, anyone could access, and everyone would love.

And in theory? Perfect. But in practice? Let’s be honest: most wikis today are graveyards of outdated information.

The Reality Most Teams Face

Ask any ops lead, customer success manager, or onboarding specialist, and they’ll tell you the same story:

• “Our wiki is out of date. Again.”
• “I spent all of last quarter writing SOPs that no one reads.”
• “I shared the doc, but people still just ask me instead.”

It’s not because people are lazy. It’s because traditional documentation takes too much time to create, too much effort to maintain, and too little reward when done right.

Here’s what’s actually happening:

1. Documentation Is Always Playing Catch-Up

Your product changes. Your processes evolve. Your team experiments.

By the time you’ve written, reviewed, formatted, and shared your new guide, the workflow it describes might already be obsolete.

This creates a vicious cycle:

• Teams stop trusting the wiki.
• Contributors stop updating it.
• Knowledge lives in people’s heads or Slack threads instead.

2. Creating Docs Is a Heavy Lift

Let’s say you do decide to keep your documentation fresh. That’s great. But how?

You have to:

• Record a Loom explaining the process.
• Transcribe the video or summarize it.
• Take screenshots of each step.
• Write titles, steps, and context.
• Format the whole thing nicely in Notion, Confluence, or your tool of choice.

That can take 1–2 hours per guide, depending on complexity.

Multiply that by every new process, every update, every new hire… and suddenly you’ve got a full-time job on your hands.

3. Most Tools Aren’t Built for Updating

Notion is beautiful. Confluence is powerful. But neither was designed to keep process documentation effortlessly updated.

You have to:

• Manually rewrite steps
• Swap out old screenshots
• Re-link resources

And even then, there’s no way to tell who’s reading what or if it’s actually helping.

What Happens Next

Eventually, teams hit one of three paths:

• Give up. They stop updating docs altogether.
• Outsource. They hire someone to manage documentation full-time.
• Scramble. They update docs only when onboarding someone new.

None of those are great options.

But here’s the good news: there’s a better way.

What to Do Instead: Make Documentation Work for You

Instead of fighting to keep your internal guides updated manually, shift to a model where your documentation updates itself — or at least gets 80% of the way there automatically.

Here’s what modern teams are doing to make it work:

1. Record First, Write Later (or Never)

Instead of starting with a blank page, record yourself doing the task once.

Then use tools like Zarta to:

• Convert the video into a structured step-by-step guide
• Add screenshots, steps, titles automatically
• Let AI handle 80–90% of the doc creation

You can still edit. But the heavy lifting is done for you.

2. Focus on Usefulness Over Perfection

Most teams get stuck trying to make the perfect wiki. Don’t.

Start with:

• Guides that solve recurring questions
• Docs that help new hires get up to speed
• FAQs that cut down internal Slack messages

It’s better to have useful and current docs than perfect but outdated ones.

3. Share in the Flow of Work

If your docs live in a tab no one opens, they won’t help.

Use tools that let you:

• Share guides via direct link
• Embed them in tools your team already uses (like Intercom, Slack, or Notion)
• Tag and organize them in a way that makes sense by department, workflow, or need

4. Track and Improve

When possible, look for ways to:

• Track guide usage
• Collect feedback from readers
• Spot which guides are outdated or unused

Even simple data helps you prioritize what needs your attention.

The Takeaway

You don’t need more documentation.

You need the right kind of documentation

• Lightweight
• Living
• Searchable
• Shareable
• Updatable

That’s what Zarta is built for.

It takes your Looms, Zooms, and screen recordings and turns them into polished, structured guides complete with steps, screenshots, and smart hotspots. And when things change? Just upload a new video. Zarta updates the guide for you.

Stop spending hours documenting every little change. Start spending that time driving revenue, onboarding faster, and scaling smarter.

Try Zarta and let your documentation write itself.