Periodic Review of Knowledge Articles

To ensure that knowledge articles contain correct and updated information, it is important that they are reviewed. Although this is optional, it helps you eliminate incorrect information while building trust and reputation among your customers.

Reviewing and validating knowledge articles

To get accurate and relevant results for users' queries, ensure that the uploaded content is effective. The best way to ensure this effectiveness is to make sure articles are reviewed periodically. The "Article Review" feature present in the PHPKB software allows you to set a review date so that authors are notified to review the content of knowledge base articles and ensure that the content is up-to-date.

Periodic Review of Knowledge Base Content is Important

Sometimes content writers are great at producing knowledge articles but they fail to keep them up-to-date with the passage of time. One client migrated to PHPKB from another knowledge base product and we noticed they had some pages that hadn’t been updated for over ten years.

PHPKB offers two important features to ensure your knowledge base articles are reviewed and contain correct and updated information.

• Approval Process: This review of unpublished articles verifies their accuracy and completeness.
• Periodic Review Process: This review of published articles validates the information and allows you to update the article, if necessary.

Approval Process

PHPKB allows you to add an approval process to your knowledge base that ensures that reviewers approve the article before it's published. The following steps illustrate how the review cycle works:

1. The article writer (author) drafts the article and submits it for review.
2. The editor (reviewer) receives an email notification about the article pending review.
3. The editor reviews the article. The editor (reviewer) and the writer (author) can collaborate over comments that are displayed on the Comments tab of the article.
4. After the review is complete, the editor can publish the article for end users.

Periodic Review Process

PHPKB allows you to add a periodic review reminder to your knowledge base articles that notifies the content writers to review and update the article content accordingly. A "Review Date" can be specified by which the reviewer should review an article. By default, the next Review Date value is one year. However, you can add a different date for the periodic article review. To alert the article assignee and reviewer for the article review before or after the next Review Date, the rule sends the following notifications:

• If the article is due for review, the notifications are sent every day, beginning five days before the review date.
• If the article is overdue for review, the notifications are sent every day until five days after the review date. After the article is reviewed, the writer (author) and editor (reviewer) do not get notifications.
• The notification is sent to the user who last reviewed the article. However, if the superuser changes the editor (reviewer) or writer (author), the notifications are sent to the updated users.

Checklist of tasks for Periodic Review of Content

1. The main task of a content reviewer during the periodic review is to make sure the knowledge base article is free from any out-of-date content. This may include outdated instructions that are no longer applicable and old screenshots that require replacement with new screenshots.
2. Second important task to have on the content review checklist is checking for broken links. In order to keep your knowledge base useful and relevant, it’s important for content writers to review their knowledge articles for broken links at least every three months. Neglecting to update links to other pages can give your visitors a bad impression of the organization when the links they try to follow don’t work.