Knowledge design

Documents written for humans are usually shaped badly for retrieval. A forty-page handbook answers a question in one paragraph buried on page thirty-one. Break material into self-contained pieces that each make sense read alone, with a heading that states what question the piece answers.

Label every piece with its source document, its effective date and its owner, and put a version marker in the text itself rather than only in a filename. When an answer later turns out to be wrong, those labels are how you trace it back to the paragraph that caused it — and tracing it back is the whole reason to bother.