Source material
The present tense, written about a moment that has passed
Every announcement is written in the present tense about a situation that will end. The lift is out of service. We are operating reduced hours while the work is carried out. Bookings for the new term open next week. Each of those is a confident, specific, well-written sentence, and not one of them contains anything that says when it was true. The date is in the byline, the folder, the URL, everywhere except inside the words.
Why this one is harder than it looks
The tense is the whole problem. A notice asserts a present state, and a passage carries the assertion without the moment. Retrieved eight months later it reads exactly as it read on the day it went up, and it will be preferred over a general page precisely because it is more specific about the situation somebody asked about.
Minutes record proposals with the same grammar as decisions. A line saying that the fee will rise in the spring is one sentence whether the meeting agreed it, deferred it, or rejected it after discussion, and the sentence recording the outcome is usually several items further down or in the following month's notes entirely. Retrieval has no way to tell a proposal from a resolution, because in the text there is no difference between them.
Nothing is ever superseded in place. When the lift is repaired, somebody publishes a new notice saying the lift is back in service, which is a separate document that does not mention the old one and does not contain the words that made the old one match. The original is still the most detailed thing you own about the lift being broken, so it keeps winning the question about the lift.
And nobody owns retirement. Taking a notice down feels like editing the record, so archives only ever grow, and an archive is a large body of confidently worded, precisely detailed statements about your own business that are no longer true. Internal minutes bring a second problem with them, which is that they attribute opinions to named people who did not expect to be quoted to a customer.
What it has to contain
Structure rather than wording. A passage pulled out of this document has to stand on its own, because that is the only form in which it will ever be read.
| The date inside the first sentence, not only in the byline | Written into the text itself, because a publication date attached to a page is metadata and metadata does not travel into a passage. From a stated date, this is the position. |
|---|---|
| An end, or the word until, on anything temporary | A closure, a reduced service, a temporary arrangement or a seasonal change carries the date it stops, or an explicit statement that the end is not yet known and where to check. A temporary notice with no end is a permanent claim. |
| Decisions written separately from the discussion that produced them | A short register of what was actually agreed, in outcome form, with no options, objections or proposals in it. The full minutes stay wherever they live and stay out of the index. |
| A standing page for anything asked about repeatedly | Where a subject keeps generating notices, the answer is a maintained page describing the current position, which is edited rather than reannounced. Announcements are a stream and a stream cannot hold a current answer. |
The rewrite, in order
Put the date and the scope inside the sentence
Rewrite the opening line of each notice so that it carries its own timestamp and its own boundaries. Not that the car park is closed, but that from a named date the car park at a named site is closed while resurfacing takes place, with an expected reopening.
That single sentence does three things a byline cannot. It survives into the passage, so any answer built from it inherits the date. It names the site, which stops a notice about one location being answered for another. And it states an expectation, which gives a reader something to act on rather than an indefinite closure.
Do the same for anything that varies by audience. A notice that applies to one class of customer, one membership type or one product line has to say so in its first sentence, because a passage arrives with no sense of who was standing where when it was written.
Write the ending into the original, not only into a new post
When a temporary situation ends, go back and edit the notice that announced it. Add a line at the top saying that this ended on a given date and pointing at the current position. Publish the new notice as well if it is worth announcing, but do not rely on it to correct the old one.
The reason is mechanical. The old notice contains the vocabulary of the problem, so it is what a question about the problem matches. The new notice contains the vocabulary of the resolution, which is not what anybody types. Somebody asking whether the lift is working is far more likely to reach the notice saying it is broken.
If a notice cannot be edited, remove it from what is indexed. A page can stay published for people and stay out of the material, and for an archive that is usually the right arrangement.
Index decisions, not minutes
Minutes exist to record a discussion, which is exactly what makes them dangerous here. Produce a separate register instead: one line per decision, stating the outcome, the date it takes effect and who it applies to. Nothing about who proposed what, nothing about what was considered and set aside, no names.
This is less work than it sounds, because somebody already extracts the decisions in order to act on them. What is being asked for is that the extraction is written down as a document rather than living in an email and a diary.
It also solves the attribution problem in one move. A member of a committee expressing a reservation in a meeting has not made a statement on behalf of your business, and a passage quoting them will read exactly as though they had.
Give somebody the job of taking notices out
Retirement is the half of this that never gets assigned, and without it every other fix decays. Whoever publishes a notice writes down the date it should come out of the index, at the moment of publishing, when the answer is obvious. Doing it later means judging whether a two year old notice still matters, which nobody enjoys and everybody defers.
For a subject that keeps returning, stop announcing and start maintaining. One page describing the current position on parking, or on opening arrangements during works, edited each time the situation changes, will out-answer a stream of eleven notices and leaves nothing behind to go stale.
The archive itself can stay online untouched. Keeping a public record and choosing what an assistant answers from are separate decisions, and conflating them is why so many businesses end up quoting their own history at customers.
What happens if you skip it
A closure that ended months ago, quoted to somebody deciding whether to set off
Somebody asks about parking. The retrieved passage is the notice from the spring, which is the most specific text you have ever published on the subject, and it says that the car park is closed and that visitors should use the street parking nearby. It is precise, it is well written, it is cited, and it stopped being true in June. The person reads it and either parks somewhere inconvenient or decides not to come.
The version that costs more happens with minutes. A line recording that a committee will move to a new fee from a given date is quoted as settled, when what the meeting actually did was float the idea and defer it. The customer now has a documented figure from your own material, with a date attached, for a change that never happened.
Both failures share a shape. The passage is entirely accurate about a moment, and nothing in it says which moment that was.
Check it against this
Before you index it
- Every notice states its date and its site inside the first sentence
- Anything temporary carries an end date or says where the current position is
- Ended notices were edited at the top, not merely followed by a new post
- Only a decisions register is indexed, never the full minutes
- No individual is named as having said anything
- Each notice had its retirement date written down when it was published
Questions
- Should we index our news page at all?
- Index the notices that state facts people ask about, and prefer a maintained page wherever a subject recurs. A news stream is organised by when something was said, and questions are organised by what is true now, which is a mismatch no amount of rewriting entirely fixes.
- Can we keep the archive published but out of the assistant's material?
- Yes, and it is usually the right call. What gets indexed is what you point at, so an archive can stay online for people who want the record while the assistant answers from a small set of current pages.
- Our minutes are a formal record and cannot be altered. What then?
- Do not alter them and do not index them. Publish a short decisions register alongside them, written in outcome form, and index that. The formal record keeps its integrity and the assistant gets something it can quote without turning a proposal into a policy.
Keep reading
- How to upload a PDF manual so an assistant can answer from itA linked PDF is never crawled and a scanned one yields nothing. What to do about page furniture, columns, split tables and size.
- How to use an internal knowledge base space as a customer-facing sourceInternal spaces are full of shorthand, owner names and links customers cannot open. What to export, what to rewrite, and what to leave behind.
- Using a staff handbook as a source without publishing the rest of itThe handbook answers customer questions in the second person, with pay and discipline bound in beside them. What to extract and what to leave.
- Every kind of source materialWhat to feed an assistant, and the surgery each document needs first.
Try it on your own material
Upload a document or point it at your site, paste one line of HTML, then ask it something only your business could answer.