Most teams document their directory in a wiki: pages describing the group conventions, the important hierarchies, the known oddities. The comparison is about which half of that content should be written at all, because the factual half is stale by design.
What belongs in the wiki#
Intent, decisions, and history: why the hierarchy is shaped this way, what the naming convention means, which oddities are deliberate and who approved them. This is knowledge no tool can compute, and writing it down is the difference between institutional memory and oral tradition.
What should never be written by hand#
The factual layer decays the day it is typed:
- Group inventories and membership counts are wrong within a week.
- Hand-maintained hierarchy diagrams are wrong at creation and worse after.
- The current exceptions list, todays circular references and orphans, is a live query pretending to be a document.
The division of labor#
The wiki keeps the why; generated views carry the what. A wiki page that links to the live structure, instead of describing it, stays true forever, and the maintenance burden drops to maintaining decisions rather than facts.
VisualizerEngine
The generated half
The hierarchy, graph, and sunburst are the always-current what, exports produce point-in-time documents when a file is required, and snapshots make the structure as of any date citable in the wiki's history pages. The wiki writes the reasons; the rendering carries the facts.