Every time I ask someone new to a documentation team to list the types of online documentation they’ve worked with, I get two answers. “Help pages.” Maybe “a wiki.” That’s it.
I get why. Most writers spend their whole career building one type, so from where they sit, “online documentation” and “help pages” look like the same thing. They’re not. There are six recognized types, and if you’ve used the internet for more than five minutes, you’ve used most of them without noticing the pattern underneath.
The Six Types Nobody Groups Together
In the last post, I mentioned three of these in passing: help systems, encyclopedias, catalogs. That undersold it. The full list, the one actually used to classify online documentation by purpose and by the tools that build it, runs to six:
- E-learning systems. Course content split into self-contained lessons a learner can take in any order, not one long script.
- Online encyclopedias. Independent entries, cross-linked by topic, never ordered like chapters. Wikipedia is the obvious one.
- Online presentations and tutorials. Step-based walkthroughs broken into short stages, a product tour, an onboarding flow.
- Online product catalogs. Organized by category, then product, then spec page. Nobody reads a catalog start to end, and nobody’s supposed to.
- Websites. Any site built as a network of linked pages instead of one scrollable document. This is the category everything else on this list technically sits inside.
- Online help for software. Context-sensitive topics, opened from inside an application at the exact point someone’s stuck.
Six categories, one shared shape underneath. Small, linked topics, none of them meant to be read in a fixed order.
The Web Itself Is the Proof This Scales
Here’s the part I find genuinely useful to remember when I’m arguing for topic-based structure with a client who’s skeptical. You don’t have to take documentation theory on faith. The World Wide Web is the largest working example of exactly this structure, a network of linked pages with no single reading order, and it’s the most-used piece of software on the planet.
Wikipedia is the same idea, purpose-built. Millions of independent entries, none of them a “chapter,” all of them findable because they’re linked to the right neighbors, the same collections and maps principle that holds a well-built documentation set together. Nobody designed Wikipedia to be read front to back. It works because nobody has to.
If the biggest, most heavily used information systems in existence are both built this way, that’s a strong argument against the instinct to write your own documentation like a book with a website skin on it.
Why the Six-Type List Actually Matters
I bring this list up with clients for a specific reason. Teams almost always default to whichever type they’re most familiar with, usually help pages, even when their content would work better as a catalog structure or a set of short e-learning modules. Naming the six types out loud is often the fastest way to get a team to notice they’ve been forcing the wrong shape onto their content for years.
That’s not a cosmetic fix. Content forced into the wrong type is content someone eventually has to break apart and rebuildby hand, at a much higher cost than getting the type right the first time. If you’re not sure which of these six shapes your own content actually needs, that’s exactly the kind of audit I do for organizations. See how I can help.
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