I truly have no idea how people run labs without wikis. like ... where IS everything? in my experience the usual answer is in a series of emails or chat messages indexed strictly by time or maybe topic, documentation is like 4 massive word docs that were last edited by the PI like 10 years ago but mostly doesn't exist. all the contextual knowledge just held in recent memory until someone leaves or it's forgotten.

the other thing that baffles me is how much people underestimate the sheer labor needed to diffuse information when the only way to do it is person to person or person to closed group. needing one or several people to explain in full a bunch of reference-like information (rather than idk skill-like information) every time someone joins the lab, or someone not knowing they need to know something until 7 months later is a wild way to organize labor.

and i am NOT tech shaming to be clear, I see it as an infrastructural problem perpetuated by like the entire digital economy relying on basic stuff being so hard you need to rent your tools from god. ppl are victims of the information economy and it has material costs to wellbeing, not saying ppl a bunch of rubes who should just do the thing that I do because I'm the best.

totally. One thing Covid taught my department was how much we relied on the labor of in person communication, and how little was documented. We came out with (low tech) grad program handbooks that make everything better.