How do you keep your knowledge base up to date?

Christophe Pasquier
7 replies
I'm the founder of Slite, a tool often used for wikis, knowledge bases and other form of documentation. We work hard on making sure that our customers have by default their documentation up to date, and an easy way to groom it when needed. I saw in hundreds of user interviews that the way for companies to handle knowledge management was often not very shiny. - The honeymoon of new documentation, lasting for 6 months, after which teams realise there starts to be pollution, outdated answers - A person is the end responsible, but not the matter expert, which makes it impossible to know what to update - End users read documents outdated, lose trust in the KB and never come back While I believe the tool has a lot of responsibility (we actively work on it and have already released great capabilities there), I'd love to hear from others how you address (or not) this problem. Shoot your best practices πŸ™Œ

Replies

Pradeepa Somasundaram
Hello, Chritophe. As we share the same place, I'm delighted to express my opinions. I work at Document360- A SaaS Knowledge base software. Though the tool offers robust features, all users may not use it 100%. This is because of the lack of best practices they follow. So we insist they in following the best practices. Best Practices in creating and managing a Knowledge base 1. Write articles to accompany the release of new features or updates. 2. Make your help articles simple to read. Use tables, bullet points, lists, photos (including GIFs and emojis), and videos to clarify difficult topics and break up space in your articles to make it easier for them to access the information they need. 3. Create a glossary 4. Form a team - distribute duties among team members and improve work collaboration 5. Make navigating simple. 6. Measure performance- Use the tool's analytics capability to track performance indicators. 7. Set up a notification alert in your knowledge base to tell you when it's time to update an article. I hope this is useful :)
Pratik Salia
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Sebastian Janus - derStartupCFO
Knowledge management is a tricky one.. haven't really found a solution yet. We are currently around 20people and growing, which means that knowledge management becomes relevant! I will check Slite out! Maybe that's just what we need
Maciej Czajkowski
We at WebWave run two types of knowledge bases. The first one is for our clients, and these are materials for educating our customers on how to use our website builder. The second knowledge base is our internal tool to write down processes that are run in our company. Since I do not know which one are you talking about, I'll talk about both :) Materials for our clients. We've got hundreds of pages of materials there. We created this knowledge base using the blog feature in our website builder. You can see it here: help.webwave.me. Every piece of information in this knowledge base is simply another article. Keeping this up to date is a hard task. Every time we launch new updates, and we do it around twice a week, one of our employees go through those updates, finds articles about updated features, and manually update those articles. We also have a button on every article, where our customer can report that article out of date. Then we update it manually. I do not really see much space for improvements here. But I see potential improvements elsewhere. Since we're just using a blogging tool, there's no way to identify articles, that were last updated more than a specific number of days/months ago. There's no way to identify images older thank a specific date. But what we lack the most, is that we're running this database in 3 different languages, and it's hard to keep track of which article has already been translated, and which has not. If you could do something, that will make it easier to run multilanguage knowledge base for customers, this might be something that can make us to change the tool. The second database is our internal company's knowledge base. We run that on google docs, and I don't really see anything, that can be upgraded there.
Uday Patel
We have used slite alot in previous year. Great product πŸ‘πŸ»πŸ‘πŸ»
Vishal Patel
set of sources such as books, articles, websites, and more. However, my knowledge is based on the text that was available at the time of my training, and it is not updated in real-time like a human would do. Therefore, it is important to note that my responses may not always be completely up-to-date or accurate.