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Creating our knowledge base

  • 28 October 2019
  • 3 replies
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Hi All, 

We’re currently in the process of creating our knowledge base, and I was just wondering what you would recommend as best practise for old articles and categories.

We’re looking to completely revamp our community by creating new categories to replace the old ones, and breakdown our current articles in to smaller FAQs for better search results.

We understand that this may lead to duplication in content. So, what would you recommend doing it old ‘redundant’ articles and categories.

Thanks,

Nikhil

iD Mobile

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Best answer by Julian 13 November 2019, 10:23

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Hi Nikhil,

Keep in mind that new categories will require users to re-follow them. Where possible, I’d suggest keeping the categories intact and just renaming them. If the use case will be entirely different after the change, then this is probably unavoidable. Requiring community members to re-follow categories of interest may lead to a decline in participation (hopefully only temporarily).

 

Regarding Knowledge, I’d like to point out the KCS (Knowledge-Centered Service) Methodology.

https://www.serviceinnovation.org/kcs/   There’s a lot to digest, but you’ll likely get some good ideas and best-practices from the content on the site. I’m happy to answer any questions you might have.

Hi @Drew C. , 

Thanks for your feedback, it was really helpful.

I’ll have a read of the KCS link and let you know how I get on.

Thanks again,

Nikhil

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Hi Nikhil,

I’m very happy to hear that you are in the process of reworking your categorization and planning to use our knowledge base as well!

I understand your concern of duplicate content. How I handled it on our community: I keep the knowledge base for official tutorials and FAQs, while the “regular” community categories are there for discussions and Q&A of users.

This way, the FAQs and Tutorials in the knowledge base will offer fundamental support for general questions, while specific problems or questions can be handled in the community.

I have created knowledge base categories which are more specific than the community categories. By doing so, I want to offer an easier navigation across the knowledge base. However it also has to do with general activity across the community categories: If there is not too much activity, you want to have rather general community categories. It would not give a good impression if there are many categories but not much activity in each of them.

 

If I were you, I would map all the content which already exists and is suitable for the knowledge base (from community categories but also outside of the community), and form your knowledge base categories based on that. Then see if there are areas which are not yet covered in the knowledge base (maybe you don’t have content on a subject you do have a community category for) and check if you can create content for it.

Once this is done, you can proceed and create these categories and publish in / move content to these categories.

Let us know if you need further assistance, of if you like us to review your new knowledge base and community categorization!

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