Diataxis is a way of thinking about and doing documentation. It establishes four needs, and four forms of documentation: tutorials, how-to guides, technical reference, and explanation.
It solves problems related to content (what to write), style (how to write it), and architecture.
It should guide most documentation efforts - and the sad thing is, it doesn't.
There's not a "prescription" to make here besides perhaps a desire for people who write to pay some attention to purpose - but the Diataxis website has some tutorials which should be quite easy to read and use (having been written via Diataxis!) and experienced authors would easily recognize the design as identifying their audience and targeting content to them - something writers of all skill levels can struggle with.
It's why a lot of the documentation in programming is so difficult to use - the writers were serving too many audiences. And it's why Youtube videos seem to do a good job of communicating information - the Youtube creators are identifying their audience.
This article, by the way, was written as a draft via the "article" operation over IRC, and submitted to the site over that medium. Then an admin opened it, added context and explanation (hopefully worth reading!) and here we are. It still identified a minor bug in operation, but that's what early deployment and usage does for you.
Contributed by dreamreal via irc://libera/%23nevet