How to keep your knowledge base healthy with Content Health

A step-by-step guide for using Content Health to keep your knowledge base up-to-date and reliable

In Stack Overflow for Teams, we often speak about “content health.” What does that mean? When the content in your knowledge base is accurate and up-to-date, your content is “healthy.” Inaccurate, outdated, and stagnant content is “unhealthy.” Thanks to multiple contributors and organic updates over time, the busiest Stack Overflow for Teams instances are the healthiest.

Stack Overflow for Teams’ new Content Health feature helps intelligently identify and surface potentially outdated or inaccurate knowledge.

Now, experts and content moderators can take action by reviewing, updating, or retiring knowledge that Content Health flags, rather than manually scouring the knowledge base for necessary updates. This feature helps shared knowledge stay relevant so that Stack Overflow for Teams continues to be a useful and valued knowledge base for your organization.

Business plan customers will have access to this feature immediately, and it’s coming soon for Enterprise users too.

Why do I need Content Health?

When your central knowledge base is outdated, employee trust erodes. The moment your team members stop trusting the platform is the moment it has lost its reason to exist! Instead, teams find one-off, piecemeal ways to get accurate information, like asking a coworker or burning hours to solve an issue that has already been solved by someone else. The trust problem grows exponentially as users stop coming back to the platform to add new knowledge, and everything becomes further outdated.

It’s difficult and time-consuming to keep a knowledge base accurate and up-to-date. Wouldn’t it be better to have an “assistant” to help you find and prioritize knowledge that needs your attention and to ensure that nothing slips through the cracks?

Our new Content Health feature gives users total confidence in the accuracy of the information on Stack Overflow for Teams.

What the Content Health feature does

You’ll get an assist in bolstering the accuracy and trustworthiness of bite-sized Q&A and long-form Articles. Stack Overflow for Teams can remain your central source of truth. Having a go-to answer hub helps new team members adopt and share knowledge, so your repository of best practices, tips, and how-to guides grows and evolves with time, technology, and expertise.

Set Review Criteria

Content is programmatically identified to be reviewed, and the criteria are customizable based on age and usage of the knowledge. With these two thresholds, you can tune the Content Health queue to your needs.

The date threshold determines the minimum age that content must be in order to show up in the review queue. The parameter ranges from 30 days to 1 year.

The health check threshold determines how deep into your knowledge base your experts should focus their curation efforts. A lower threshold puts more of your content into the queue, while the high threshold puts fewer pieces of knowledge into the queue.

Access to Content Health

The Content Health feature is specifically useful for experts, engaged users, and Moderators of your Stack Overflow for Teams instance.

With the Content Health feature, experts don’t need to go deep in the weeds to find out which knowledge needs their attention. The Content Health review queue uncovers knowledge that’s due for a second look based on its age and usage.

Anyone can access Content Health after earning 75 reputation points, and Admins can quickly appoint Moderators for access too.

The Moderator role is new to the Business plan with this new Content Health feature. It allows a user access to the Content Health feature in addition to the ability to manage Tags and edit Articles.

Those with access to Content Health can use Tags to filter the content to divvy up tasks and focus their efforts on verifying areas where they’re knowledgeable.

They can verify, edit, or mark knowledge as obsolete. Once a post is verified or edited, it is removed from the review queue.

Track activity and engagement

The feature includes high-level statistics on the top reviewer each day and over time, and a historical view of the changes made to the knowledge base via the Content Health feature.

Lastly, users can earn badges for their time spent making updates and improvements to the knowledge base, which encourages participation in the ongoing accuracy and clean-up of the platform.

The new Content Health feature is now available to Business plan customers, and it will be coming soon to Enterprise customers.

To learn about Content Health, watch this video.