§ Journal
Research
8 min read
What we learned from 40,000 unanswered questions
Most unanswered questions are not hard. They are missing a document nobody wrote down.
Mira Castellanos

Across pilot teams, about one question in seven could not be answered from the sources connected.
Three causes
Some answers lived in people’s heads. Some were in a tool we were not connected to. And some contradicted each other, so the honest answer was ‘these two documents disagree’.
What teams did
The review queue turned these gaps into a to-do list. Owners wrote the missing page once, and the same question stopped coming back.
§
Keep reading

Engineering
How we check that a source really says what we claim
A citation that points at the wrong page is worse than no citation. This is the checking step we run before an answer is shown.

Guides
Writing a company handbook people actually search
Seven habits that make a handbook easier for people, and for tools like ours, to answer questions from.

Research
What we learned from 40,000 unanswered questions
Most unanswered questions are not hard. They are missing a document nobody wrote down.
The Ostler letter
Notes like these, once a month.
New articles, release notes and one useful link.