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.

Assess 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, assess the following criteria to start prioritizing.

A template for your tracking doc is available table on this page or in this Google spreadsheet.

Doc relevance

1. 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.
2. Filter or update your tracking document to exclude pages you decided were out of scope.

Don't just delete pages from your tracking doc if you decide they're out of scope for your current work -- it's useful to know which content relates to your docs and how users might navigate to and from your pages. File Phabricator tasks to record areas of future investigation and work needed to form clear connections between related pages and your docs.

Incoming links

1. 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 get a sense of how connected a page is. Pages that are linked to from many other pages are more important to improve than those that are isolated.
2. Add a general indication of the scale of incoming links for each page in your tracking document.

Pageviews

1. 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.
   1. Pages with close-to-zero numbers should be considered for archiving, especially if their content is volatile or outdated.
   2. 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).
2. Add a general indication of the volume of pageviews for each page in your tracking document.

Prioritize

Sort your tracking document so you can see the pages that you consider relevant and which have the most incoming links and pageviews. Pick a cutoff point for the number of pages you want to focus on reviewing, and add all the rest to a Phabricator task so you (or others) can return to them after you've improved your most essential content.

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.