Plan requirement
| Subscription | Suite Enterprise or higher, Knowledge Enterprise |
| Access | Agent |
Verification marks an article as checked, and flags it when it is time to check again. The answer to quietly ageing content.
The problem
Articles do not announce that they have gone out of date. A screenshot from two versions ago, a step that no longer exists, a policy that changed: all of it sits there being confidently wrong.
Nobody notices, because the people who would are the ones who already know the answer.
How verification works
An article is marked verified by somebody who checked it, with a date. A rule sets how long that lasts, and when it expires the article goes back to unverified and appears on the Needs verification list.
The rule runs weekly and the reminders go out on Mondays and Wednesdays, to the article's owner. Where a group owns the article, every member of that group gets the email, which is either useful or a way of making sure nobody feels responsible.
Verification is an internal signal. It shows in the articles list for agents and admins; readers are not shown it.
Two things decide whether the person who owns an article can clear it. They need publish rights: an owner without them cannot verify their own article, and will keep getting reminders about it. And a knowledge admin can verify in bulk, which is the way out of a backlog rather than asking twenty people to click twenty times.
Turning this on marks everything unverified. On the day the feature becomes available, every article in your knowledge base starts as unverified, so the first list is your whole knowledge base and the first round of reminder emails goes to everybody. Plan that week rather than discovering it.
Set intervals by volatility
You do that with several rules rather than one setting. A rule combines a frequency with a filter, so the section that follows a changing product gets one interval and your stable process articles another. Twenty rules is the ceiling, which is far more than any sensible scheme needs.
- Six months for anything following a product that changes.
- A year for stable process articles.
- Shorter for anything with prices, dates or legal content.
Unverified does not undo. Once a rule has marked articles unverified, they stay on the list and in the reminder emails until somebody verifies them, even if you change or delete the rule that put them there. So a rule set too aggressively cannot be withdrawn; the only way out is through, one article at a time.
A single interval for everything means either checking stable articles pointlessly or letting volatile ones drift.
Somebody has to do it
Verification produces a list. Without a person and a rhythm, that list grows and gets ignored, and you have added a metric rather than solving the problem.
An hour a month, working through the oldest, keeps a knowledge base honest.
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