How to build an internal knowledge base people actually use

Every company has a graveyard: a wiki with 900 pages, 40 of which are current. The instinct is to run a documentation sprint. That fixes the symptom for a quarter and then the graveyard grows back.

The real problem is retrieval cost

People do not skip the wiki because they are lazy. They skip it because asking a colleague takes eleven seconds and searching takes four minutes with a 50% chance of finding something stale. Make retrieval faster than asking and behaviour changes on its own.

A rollout that works

1. 1Pick one painful question category — onboarding, pricing rules, refunds.
2. 2Index only the sources that answer it. Resist indexing everything.
3. 3Put the answer surface where the question is asked: Slack, not a new tab.
4. 4Log unanswered questions weekly. That list is your documentation backlog.
5. 5Expand one category at a time.

The weekly unanswered-question list is the most valuable artefact in this process. It turns documentation from a guess into a queue with evidence behind it.