Keeping it good
Every knowledge base dies the same way: nobody prunes it.
Writing is a task somebody is asked to do. Reviewing is a task nobody is asked to do, has no visible result, and takes as long as reading the thing. So it does not happen, and within a year the search returns four answers of which one is right.
Make the reviewing take five seconds and visibly change something, and it happens.
The queue
The fix is on the row, so nobody has to open the ticket.
Resolved tickets arrive with the person who resolved them, the product area and what actually worked already visible. Filter by area, by severity, by when it was resolved.
Which is the whole difference between a queue somebody works through on a Friday and a queue that grows.
- Import fails after a schema change2 days agoresolved by A. MensahWhat worked: Rebuilt the index after the schema change
- Connector times out on large batches4 days agoresolved by S. IyerWhat worked: Raised the batch ceiling and re-queued
- Promotion carries a note —
Why this one is worth trusting, from the person who decided it. And clearing the note is a deliberate act rather than a side effect.
- It changes the ranking immediately —
Not a badge somebody has to notice — a term in the same arithmetic every search uses.
- And it survives re-indexing —
Along with the categories the curator assigned. Which is what makes promoting once safe rather than something to redo every time the source changes.
- Un-promoting clears the note —
So the next person to look starts fresh rather than inheriting somebody else's reasoning about a document that has since changed.
Retraction
And the other direction, which almost nobody builds.
A ticket that stops being resolved withdraws its document from search. Not flagged as stale — removed from the thing that recommends it.
Because the failure mode of a self-writing knowledge base is not emptiness. It is filling with fixes that stopped working, and the next person trying them anyway.
›Who can promote?
A curator role ships, separate from authoring and from administration.
›Does promoting change the article?
No. It marks it and changes where it ranks. The text is whatever the source produced.
›How do we know what to write next?
The report of searches that returned nothing, ordered by how often each was asked. Usually a better backlog than anybody's intuition.