Wiki Patterns
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EditBuilt-in obsolescence
What is it?
Many organisations are starting to use wikis for formal documentation, such as functional and technical specifications.
They may encounter resistance, because of some legitimate worries. In brief: Certain types of documents have a built-in obsolescence.
In more detail:
- Documentation gets out of date - even if you only have a small amount of it.
- Technical specifications are valuable at the time of product development. But in many cases the specs are not kept up to date with subsequent product enhancements.
- Agile companies don't want to become documentation-bound. Too much of a good thing can slow anyone down, especially if you have to keep it up to date.
- You cannot rely on someone to mark the documents as 'out of date' after the fact.
Usage
At the creation of such a document, the creator should declare its validity period.
Example
Some wikis, such as Confluence
allow you to create a 'template'. When creating a page, you can base the page upon a specific template.
This wiki pattern suggests that you create a built-in obsolescence template. The template would contain something like this at the top of the page:
- The usual stuff, like product name and feature.
- Product release number.
- Document validity period e.g. June to July 2007
- A warning message along these lines:
Beware of built-in obsolescence
This document was written as an aid to initial feature development. It will not be kept up to date with later enhancements. After the validity period shown above, you can use the document for a broad overview of the functionality. But do not rely on the details.
Related Patterns
- Wikiphobia - by adding the 'built-in obsolescence' warning, we will allay the legitimate fears that incorrect information could spread throughout and even outside the organisation.
- WikiGnome, also known as WikiGardener - the 'built-in obsolescence' pattern will greatly ease the WikiGnome's job, because there's no need to trawl through the wiki marking pages as out of date.
- ContentAlert - another type of content alert.
- Set Window of Discussion - a way of forcing time sensitivity for (non-obsolescent) evolving documents
Adoption Patterns
Adoption Anti-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Too true that you can't rely on someone to mark an outdated document as obsolete.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.
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?
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\\
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.