wiki curation best practices/recommendations

[AlexH]

My company is interested in hearing your recommendations for wiki curation best practices. We've been running an instance of Confluence since 2005 without an official cleanup/curation policy to help purge old/dated content.

We're hoping to mine the confluence community for things that do/don't work before implementing an official policy to help maintain the usefulness of our wiki with 7 years of content.

Things we're considering:

1) automated notification to page owners of pages that exceed certain thresholds of "freshness" to ask them to review and update, or delete.

2) automated cleanup (move to an archive space, or outright deletion) of pages via a plugin that uses a variety of metrics to automatically select pages older than a certain date if certain criteria (labels, view counts, etc) is met.

3) manual review/cleanup effort.

Any wisdom you can share would be appriciated, thanks!

[BillA · Accepted solution]

There are some really good tips in this blog post ... http://www.kikamaca.com/2011/08/managing-content-in-confluence-archiving-and-retention-policies/

[AlexH]

Excellent, thank you!

[Brett Paul]

This is a dead link now.

[Ole Kristensen]

Good thoughts, but you have to think carefully about your definition of 'freshness'. We have scientific articles about minerals that are not likely to change within the next century. Nor all the math articles ;-)

[Midori]

the Archiving Plugin (at https://plugins.atlassian.com/plugins/com.midori.confluence.plugin.archiving) suggested by Thomas-S does support the concept of "content that never expires"!

it's dead simple: you just apply the tag "archive" or "archive-single" to a page to mark its whole page subtree ("archive") or this page alone ("archive-single") as "content that never expires, please skip it during archiving".

see the current user manual here: http://midori.hu/products/confluence-archiving-plugin/documentation

[Thomas Schlegel]

Hi Alex,

there is an archiving plugin: https://plugins.atlassian.com/plugins/com.midori.confluence.plugin.archiving

We do not use it, because, as Ole mentioned, it is not easy to say when a page is out of date. This plugin moves outdated pages automatically to an archive space.

We use date-tags to mark pages that have to be updated regularly. We look at these pages manually...

Best regards

Thomas

[AlexH]

thanks for the feedback :)

[Ole Kristensen]

You have think carefully about your definitionof 'freshness'. We have scientific articles about minerals that are not likely to change in the next decade. Nor all the math articles ;-)