Pinned Docs and Stale Links: Auditing a Wiki After 18 Months

Of the 96 links pinned in the team wiki, 23 pointed to documents that had been moved or deleted, and another 9 pointed to versions more than a year old. The audit took one afternoon and produced a list nobody wanted to own.

The wiki belonged to a 30-person software company that had grown from 11 people in two years. Pinning had been introduced as a courtesy, a way to keep the useful page near the top. It had never been reviewed.

What pinning was for

Originally, pinning marked the four or five pages a new joiner needed in the first week: the laptop setup guide, the leave policy, the on-call rota and the glossary. By month eighteen the pinned block held 96 links and occupied most of the first screen.

People had stopped reading it. The wiki’s own search box was used 4.6 times more often than the pinned block, according to the platform’s own counters.

The audit

The audit was mechanical. Each link was opened, its status recorded as live, moved, deleted or outdated, and the date of the last edit noted. Two people did the work in a single afternoon with a shared spreadsheet and no debate about what counted as useful.

The results were worse than expected in one specific way: the deleted links were not random. They clustered on the three topics that had changed most, which were exactly the topics a new joiner would look up first.

Why the links rotted

When a document was replaced, the old page was archived and a new one created, because that was how the platform’s permissions worked. The pinned link kept pointing at the archive. Nobody noticed, because the archive page still displayed the content and looked correct.

A reader following a stale link would read a policy from fourteen months earlier and have no signal that it was out of date. That was the real finding.

The replacement rule

The team cut the pinned block to six entries and added a rule: a pinned page must show its last review date at the top, and that date must be inside the last 180 days. Anything older is unpinned automatically by a scheduled check.

The six that remained covered onboarding, security, the on-call rota, the release checklist, expenses and the glossary.

Where the archive pages were kept

Archived documents were kept, because deleting them loses the reasoning behind old decisions. They were moved behind a single archive index and marked with a banner that names the current version. Two people argued for deletion and were outvoted on the grounds that a wrong decision from last year is still useful evidence.

The banner was the compromise that made the archive safe to keep.

Five months on

The scheduled check has run five times and unpinned eleven pages. The pinned block has never exceeded seven entries. Support questions that begin with a link to an old policy fell from 14 a month to 2.

What the audit could not fix

The audit found stale links and left the harder problem alone. Twenty-three documents were reachable but wrong in substance, because a policy had changed without the document being rewritten. A link check cannot see that, and neither can an automatic review date, since a page can be confirmed by someone who has not read the paragraph that matters.

Four pages in the sample carried a review date inside the last ninety days and a clause that contradicted the current process. The people who confirmed those pages were reading for structure rather than for accuracy.

The check nobody wanted to run

The scheduled check was written by one person in an afternoon and has run without maintenance for five months. It reports two things: pinned pages older than 180 days, and pinned pages whose link returns an error. Neither check requires judgement, which is why it has survived.

The team briefly considered adding a third check for contradictions and abandoned it after a week, because the false positive rate was high enough that people stopped opening the report.

Ninety-six links once sat at the top of the wiki, a third of them broken or outdated. Six sit there now, every one of them reviewed inside the last 180 days, and the search box is no longer the only reliable door.