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Ethan Palm
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39 lines
2.4 KiB
Plaintext
39 lines
2.4 KiB
Plaintext
---
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title: "Maintenance"
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description: "Keep your documentation accurate and up-to-date over time."
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keywords: ["maintenance", "content lifecycle", "stale content"]
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---
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<Tip>
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This page explains strategies for keeping your documentation accurate and valuable over time, from automated checks to content lifecycles.
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</Tip>
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## Automate what you can
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Introduce automations where you can, such as:
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- **Track stale content:** Run a script to flag important docs that haven't been updated in the last three months. Are they still accurate?
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- **Automate documentation updates:** Build a workflow to automatically update documentation when code is merged with the [agent API](/guides/automate-agent).
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- **Enforce standards with linters:** Use [Vale](http://Vale.sh) or [CI checks](/deploy/ci) to automatically catch formatting issues, writing style deviations, or missing metadata on every pull request.
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## Set up a review process
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Documentation might never be perfect, and that's okay. You should have a threshold of acceptance where documentation is functional and useful.
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Balance efficiency with quality:
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- **Focus on high-impact docs.** Not every page needs regular updates. Make sure the most important pages are reviewed regularly for accuracy and relevance.
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- **Leverage your community.** If your docs are open-source, empower users to flag issues or submit fixes via pull requests. This builds trust and keeps content fresh.
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## Know when to rewrite
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Over time, documentation naturally accumulates caveats and workarounds. When incremental fixes create more confusion than clarity, a full overhaul might be the best option.
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- **Plan for periodic resets.** A major cleanup, especially if best practices or the product itself has evolved significantly, saves time for your team and your users.
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- **Start with a structured audit.** Interview support teams, analyze user feedback, and document what is missing, misleading, or redundant before rewriting.
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- **Complete rewrites in focused sprints.** A full overhaul doesn't have to happen all at once. Prioritize sections with the biggest impact.
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## Wrong docs can be worse than no docs
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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.
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