Stack Overflow improves “content health” to end stale knowledge
Stack Overflow has improved its “Content Health” feature that helps teams identify and fix outdated knowledge.
Content Health is a feature of Stack Overflow for Teams that identifies potentially outdated or inaccurate knowledge content to ensure employees can get the right answers to their questions.
Separate research from GitHub recently revealed that open source developers and enterprise developers experience around a 50% increase in productivity when provided with detailed and correct documentation, showing the potential gains with the accuracy and updating of the content.
Content Health was first announced in November 2021 and was immediately available to Stack Overflow for Teams “Business” plan customers before rolling out to “Enterprise” customers.
Stack Overflow says it saw a more than 600% increase in monthly editing activity 90 days after Content Health’s initial limited release.
Teresa Dietrich, Product Manager at Stack Overflow, said:
“Nearly every technology leader has seen knowledge management tools become inactive and irrelevant within an organization due to a lack of investment in maintaining institutional knowledge within it. Users lose trust in existing content, rendering it ineffective over time.
Outdated content should not be the norm and eventual expectation of knowledge management tools. Content Health enables teams to recognize and prioritize their knowledge debt as well as their technology debt, removing the finite lifespan we’ve come to expect.
One of the main enhancements to Content Health is sending notifications to experts when content requires their attention. These alerts will appear in their personalized “For You” feed and via email.
When there’s a whole slew of knowledge that needs updating, Stack Overflow makes it easier for users to prioritize with new filtering options. Content can be filtered by tagged topics or knowledge types, such as Q&A or Article.
Finally, Stack Overflow improved the workflow and experience by making it easier to submit corrections. Administrators and moderators can also now accept new answers to a question on behalf of users.
“Like most companies our size, we have a complex technology stack and a large distributed team. We rely on Stack Overflow for Teams to help scale our subject matter experts across time zones,” Adele commented. Hardwick, senior versitilist engineer at 84.51°.
“Having a holistic view of updating content with Content Health helps us better understand where knowledge gaps exist within the team and where team members might be stuck so we can address them. “
(Photo by Lucas George Wendt on Unsplash)
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