Wiki Patterns

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Too true that you can't rely on someone to mark an outdated document as obsolete. However, it is also true that people are probably just as likely to not alert anyone to a document that has passed its obsolescence date - and that it is often difficult to put a concrete validity period on anything.

Say for example you set a document's obsolescence date at 4 weeks, but the information remains valid - several new problems pop up at this point such as a lack of trust in the content, etc. Also, if this happens several times, a user could potentially lose faith in the entire wiki and not just select pieces of content.

In these cases, 'silent' obsolescence is a good alternative - e.g. using meta-data to tag the period that a document should remain valid for, without any visual indicators. Then you would design a report that listed all 'obsolete' pages, with the content and/or obsolescence date being adjusted as appropriate only after review.


Posted by David Dembo at Oct 09, 2007 23:26




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I think that David makes an excellent point.

And I'm not sure if this might deter some users from making changes and keeping the article up to date.

With the sign there, would some users possibly see the sign. Then see that as an indication as the article is out of date and create a new page with the new material as opposed to just updating the current page?


Posted by Nick Cliff at Dec 12, 2007 23:15




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My company uses Confluence and we've always wanted some better way to get rid of old content.  Rather than have planned obsolescence, I'd love for wikis to have a way to formally mark pages for archival, which would remove them from search results by default, and possibly move them to a logical archival location.  I've implemented wikis in several organizations and I'm always asked "How do I archive stuff?"  I've never been able to answer this.

See my comments here:

http://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CONF-3921\\


Posted by John Price at Jan 02, 2008 15:25; last updated at Feb 05, 2008 15:28




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For me, I advocate using the blogs for information that is related with time. So information that will expire over time are placed in the blogs instead of the wikis.


Posted by Sim Hua Soon at Feb 06, 2008 11:13




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@John Price: I agree with you. I would love an Archive Space feature.  Sometimes you create a Space for a project that has an end.  You still want to find the information for "historical" reasons, but it shouldn't be part of your day-to-day anymore.


Posted by fredguth at Nov 16, 2008 16:32