What does a good knowledge article look like, and who decides?

Most knowledge bases have a quality problem nobody owns.

Ask ten people what a good article looks like and you will get ten answers. The writer thinks it is good because it is accurate. The service desk thinks it is good because it is short. The person who needed it at nine in the evening thinks it is good if it solved the problem first time. All three are right. None of them is the standard.

That gap matters more than it used to. When search, chat and AI assistants surface your articles, a weak article no longer sits quietly at the bottom of a list. It gets served, confidently, to someone who trusts it.

Agree what good means, in writing

A useful quality standard is short. Five or six checks a reviewer can apply in a couple of minutes:

• Does the title say the problem the way a user would say it?
• Can someone follow it without asking for help?
• Is it accurate today, and does it say when it was last checked?
• Is there one clear outcome, not three half answers?
• Would a newcomer understand every term in it?

The point is not to score articles for the sake of it. The point is that everyone means the same thing when they say "good".

Then give it a name

Standards drift when nobody owns them. A committee can agree the checklist. A committee cannot answer for it. As Ian Hughes puts it in What Stays the Same, "Accountability needs a name. Singular." That applies to knowledge quality as much as anything else in the service. One person owns the standard, decides when it changes, and is the one people go to when an article lets someone down.

Make it part of the flow, not an audit

Quality checks work best at two moments: when an article is first published, and when it comes up for review. Yearly clean-ups tend to become amnesties. Small, regular checks become habit.

Three questions to take to your next team meeting

• If we asked five colleagues what makes a good article, would we get the same answer?
• Who, by name, owns our knowledge quality standard?
• When did we last check an article against it?

Good knowledge is not an accident. It is a decision someone made, and keeps making.

Next step:

Share how your team defines a good article in the Knowledge and self-service conversation on ESM's Exchange: https://exchange.esm.institute

Tags: knowledge management, service management, self-service, ESM