The KB with 117 stale pages nobody knew about
First Monday the staleness audit ran at a compliance startup. 117 pages flagged past their freshness rule. The ops lead replied "okay, now I know what to cut." Three weeks later the KB was down to 87 pages, all fresh.
A KB that grows forever does not work. A KB that sheds stale pages weekly stays alive.
The moment the audit ran
Compliance startup, 340 KB pages built over two years. We shipped the staleness audit Friday. Monday 9 AM, the audit posted to Slack: 117 pages past their freshness rule, each pinging its owner. The ops lead screenshotted it and posted: "I did not know 117 pages were stale. This is great."
What happened next
Over three weeks, 117 pages dropped to 0 still-stale. Most got updated by owners. About 40 got archived because their SOP was no longer how the team worked. The KB went from 340 pages to 87. Reading time for a new hire dropped from 12 days to 4.
Why freshness lives on the page
Different pages stay fresh at different cadences. A legal SOP re-expires every 30 days. A style guide lives 180. An engineering playbook at 60. Each page carries its own rule. The audit reads the rule, not a global timeout. People trust the flag because it matches how the doc actually ages.
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