Documentation/Toolkit/Collection audit/Prioritize

This is Step 3 of the Documentation collection audit process. In Step 2, you gathered a large list of docs and probably learned how much your topic is covered in related docs you never knew existed.

Prioritize by doc importance and relevance
You should now have a list of documents that are potentially in scope for your assessment. Often, the list will feel overwhelming and contain content with varying degrees of importance or relevance. To focus your work on the most important areas, analyze the relevance and importance of each of the docs you've identified.

Doc relevance
Is this page clearly part of the collection of docs in scope for your team/project, or is it potentially out of scope? Refer back to the goals you identified at the beginning of this process. If content doesn't directly relate to those goals and your intended audience, it's out of scope. Filter or update your tracking document to exclude pages you decided were out of scope.

Pageviews
For the docs that remain in your list, use page information or https://pageviews.wmcloud.org/ to assess the traffic to those pages. There's no general benchmark for how many pageviews are "a lot" vs. "few" -- that depends on the content. Some pages might receive traffic only as a result of bigger changes in the documented code, or at specific seasonal peaks. Add a general indication of the volume of pageviews for each doc in your list.


 * Pages with close-to-zero numbers should be considered for archiving, especially if their content is volatile or outdated.
 * Pages with high numbers might benefit from being broken up, especially if they cover multiple subjects and receive high traffic as a result of containing all possible information about a topic but in a wall of text that offers no navigation guidance for the reader (Help:System_message is an example of this type of information overload).

Incoming links
Use Special:WhatLinksHere to review the docs that link to your landing page and to several of your key docs. For now, don't get distracted by reviewing the docs that link to your key docs, just try to note in your tracking document the scale of the incoming links. Pages that are linked to from many other pages are more important to improve than those that are isolated.

Next step
Now that you've narrowed your focus, it's time to assess what improvements will help your most important docs achieve their purpose and delight your audience. Go to Step 4.