Staging an update to a published article

Work in progress lets you rewrite a published article without readers seeing the half-finished version.

Work in progress lets you rewrite a published article without readers seeing the half-finished version.

Stage an update

1. Open the published article.
2. Start a work in progress version.
3. Edit it. Readers keep seeing the published one.
4. Review it, or have somebody else review it.
5. Publish, replacing the live version.

The problem it solves

Without it, editing a published article is live from the first save. A rewrite interrupted halfway leaves readers with a mangled article and no warning.

That is a genuine risk on a busy help centre, and it makes people avoid improving articles at all, which is worse.

When to use it

• A rewrite rather than a correction.
• An update tied to a release, prepared in advance and published on the day.
• Anything needing review before readers see it.

When not to

A typo, a broken link, a wrong number. Fix those directly. Staging a two-character change adds ceremony to something that should take ten seconds.

Do not leave it staged

A work in progress version that sits for months is a half-finished article nobody remembers, and the live version is the one people read anyway. Finish it or discard it.

See also

• Editing and saving an article
• Scheduling publishing and unpublishing
• What Team Publishing is