Feeling this pain a hell of a lot right now. Where I work, confluence has several simultaneous problems. Misuse of the medium: - It's used as a repository for

Feeling this pain a hell of a lot right now. Where I work, confluence has several simultaneous problems. Misuse of the medium: - It's used as a repository for product requirements (which are usually either stale, or may actually be speculative of future incarnations of a feature. In either case this is usually linked to as reference acceptance criteria in JIRA tickets, which creates all the problems you'd imagine). - It's used to hoard information about what X team did to get something done according to another team's processes (i.e. getting secrets added to our secrets store, how to add a piece of infrastructure, etc.), which have likely changed since X team went through this (and the reference material is rarely ever linked to). - It's used to document abstractions in code, and is usually stale as the code and documentation are not reviewed together in pull requests. Lack of ownership/maintenance: - All public confluence articles appear to get indexed in search (and they are by default published as public), and however search is configured it seems to be very bad at determining relevancy, so you are just as likely to get someone's stale instructions for how they followed some internal procedure as you are the owning team's documentation for doing it - There seem to be no standards for what information needs to be provided in documentation about internal APIs. No consistency on providing information about request/response types, parameters, contextual/semantic information, limits, true SLAs (as almost everything advertised as an SLA is an SLO), downstream dependencies, etc. This may actually be a "wrong tool for the job" instance too, but in the absence of any other consolidated way of documenting APIs, this is the best thing this company has. - No one seems to be responsible for culling stale information, and since hoarding is so prevalent, people are reluctant to actually do it. Sometimes I come across stale information in articles published by users with deactivated accounts, sometimes the only indication that the information is stale is that someone has added "(Archived)" in the title (or something similar), sometimes there's just a banner on the page saying something like "this information is no longer valid, see other team" and then linking to the wrong place to find the current information, etc. All of these pages still rank highly in search results. There may be several organizational dysfunctions involved in creating this state of affairs, and you should have a plan for incentivizing good wiki maintenance and proper use that is a more complicated and sophisticated process, but generally I'm in favor of more radical plans to cull stale information when you find yourself in this kind of situation (if you can get buy-in). This is fundamentally different from crufty old code, because there's nothing battle-testing bad documentation like old code is battle-tested by reality, and stale information is effectively disinformation and it propagates all the usual costs of disinformation (slowed retrieval of necessary information, ill-informed decisions, etc.).