Knowledge base

A knowledge base is a structured, searchable collection of an organisation's documented information, used internally by staff or externally by customers.

Internal and external knowledge bases look similar and behave differently. An external base serves a large audience with a narrow set of questions, so it pays to maintain. An internal base serves a small audience with an unbounded set of questions, so the maintenance cost per article is far higher and decay sets in quickly.

The usual failure is not the tool. It is that writing an article is voluntary while the work that would justify it is not, so the base fills with what was easy to write rather than what people actually ask.

A knowledge base is a good home for stable, explicit procedure. It is a poor home for reasoning and exceptions, which change too often to survive as hand-maintained pages.