This page explains strategies for keeping your documentation accurate and valuable over time, from automated checks to content lifecycles.
Automate maintenance tasks
Reduce manual work with automation:
- Track stale content: Flag pages that haven’t been updated in three months to verify accuracy.
- Automate updates: Use the agent API to update documentation when code changes.
- Enforce standards: Use Vale or CI checks to catch formatting issues, style deviations, and missing metadata on every pull request.
Establish review processes
Documentation doesn’t need to be perfect. Set a quality threshold where content is functional and useful.
Balance efficiency with quality:
- Prioritize high-impact pages: Focus regular reviews on the most important documentation. Not every page requires frequent updates.
- Leverage your community: For open-source documentation, encourage users to flag issues or submit fixes. This builds trust and keeps content current.
Recognize when to rewrite
Documentation accumulates caveats and workarounds over time. When incremental fixes cause more confusion than clarity, consider a full rewrite.
- Plan periodic overhauls: Major cleanups save time when best practices or products evolve significantly.
- Audit before rewriting: Interview support teams, analyze user feedback, and identify missing, misleading, or redundant content.
- Work in focused sprints: Tackle rewrites in phases. Prioritize high-impact sections.
Wrong docs can be worse than no docs
Outdated or misleading documentation wastes users’ time and erodes trust. In cases where a page is completely inaccurate and unfixable in the short term, it’s often better to remove it entirely. Users will appreciate having less information over having wrong information.
