Plan requirement
| Subscription | Any plan |
| Access | Admin |
Two fields, two jobs. The author is attribution, the owner is responsibility, and both are worth correcting when people leave.
Change either one
- Open the article's settings.
- Change the author, the owner, or both.
- Save.
Whoever edits an article does not automatically become its author or its owner. Both fields only change when somebody changes them.
What each one does
- The author is attribution. It is the name shown on the article, and it can be any agent.
- The owner is responsibility. It starts out as the author and can be set to somebody else, or to a group, and it is the owner who gets the reminder when the article is due for review.
An owner that is a group is often the better answer, because a team outlives any of its members.
Why it matters
When a colleague leaves and their articles keep their name, three things follow: nobody feels responsible for keeping them current, questions go to somebody who has gone, and readers who recognise the name draw conclusions about how current the content is.
The reminders are the practical half. An article owned by somebody who no longer has an account sends its review reminders nowhere, and it quietly falls out of date.
Find their articles first
The article list can be filtered by author and by owner, which turns "everything Sanne wrote" into one screen rather than a search through the sections.
Worth doing before you reassign, because the list is usually longer than anyone expects and some of it needs rewriting rather than a new name.
Do it as part of offboarding
When somebody leaves, find their articles and reassign them. It takes minutes and it is the difference between a knowledge base with owners and one that is nobody's.
If several articles need a new home, they can be reassigned together rather than one at a time.
The owner is the field to prioritise. Attribution on an old article rarely does harm; a review reminder nobody receives does.
Neither field grants access
Editing rights come from roles and management permissions. Changing the author or the owner changes attribution and responsibility, not who may open the article.
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