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Three levels of technical documentation: wasteland, English garden, French garden

Olivier Carrère • Aug 18, 2026 • 2 min read

• #technical-writing #structured-authoring #docs-as-code #content-strategy

Why does technical documentation quality stall despite heavy investments in new authoring tools? Evaluating content maturity requires mapping documentation systems onto three gardening archetypes: the unmanaged wasteland, the cultivated English garden, and the strictly structured French garden.

Enters content maturity mapping. Document quality depends on three synchronized factors: process, team ownership, and semantic content format.

Wasteland architecture

Unmanaged documentation lacks assigned ownership and standardized workflows. Authors produce disconnected files across arbitrary formats: a Word document in one folder, an unmaintained wiki page in another, and static PDFs exported years ago.

A wasteland isn’t defined by poor writing. Accidental quality occurs when an engineer writes a clear guide during downtime. Without formal maintenance processes, single pages decay when products update.

Topic-based English gardens

An English garden introduces dedicated ownership and consistent authoring workflows. Content team members maintain unstructured or lightweight topics using predictable tools.

Cultivating topic-based content provides reliable user documentation without XML schema complexity. Maintaining unstructured Markdown files in Git repositories delivers high accuracy without structured authoring overhead.

Structured French gardens

A French garden introduces strict semantic constraints: content elements conform to rigid DITA or DocBook schemas rather than desktop publishing layouts.

Cartoon: Louis XIV in ornate fleur-de-lys robes wades knee-deep through a reedy marsh, asking a gardener 'Must we pass through the English phase to reach the French one?' The gardener, in a straw hat, holds a rolled formal garden plan and pruning shears; a palace like Versailles rises under construction behind them. — The Sun King wants the French garden’s deliberate order and would rather skip the informal English garden on the way: but the levels are climbed in turn, and for many teams the English garden is already far enough.

Separating semantic payloads (warnings, prerequisites, steps) from presentation stylesheets allows automated single-source publishing across multiple languages and channels.

Component interdependence

Adopting structured DITA schemas without establishing process discipline creates an expensive XML wasteland. Each maturity level requires alignment across all three pillars:

Maturity diagnostics

Diagnostic evaluation prevents premature migration to complex schemas. Teams in a wasteland must establish process and ownership before changing markup formats.

The next step is running a content audit to measure current reuse requirements before committing to a DITA XML migration.

The three levels of technical documentation: the maturity model in reference form.
Structured and unstructured formats: what makes a format semantic.
KISS Principle of Simplicity: why restraint should govern each step up.

External sources

Hero image: “The Ingenious Cottage Garden at Chatsworth, Derbyshire” by UGArdener, licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0.