FORMWEFT01 Inventory sources and owners
For each source, record the name, business purpose, maintainer, update time, and whether it is authoritative. Distinguish formal policies, personal notes, historical emails, and reference-only material.
FIELD GUIDE / KNOWLEDGE
Enterprise knowledge base: first organize 'trustworthiness' before increasing 'quantity'.
Putting documents into a retrieval system is just the start. Inconsistent sources, outdated versions, missing permissions, or unclear questions can all affect answers. First establish knowledge responsibility and evaluation methods.
Five-item knowledge preparation checklist
You can start with one business topic and a small amount of authoritative material, then expand coverage after validation.
02 Clarify usage and access permissions
Confirm that the material is allowed for the current project, and list the accessible organizations, roles, and fields. Retrieval permissions should inherit business rules, not be visible to everyone just because they are imported into the knowledge base.
03 Handle versions and conflicts
Mark documents as effective, expired, or superseded; when the same question has different interpretations, let the business owner decide. The system retains conflicts it cannot automatically determine, and does not pick an answer on its own.
04 Prepare real questions and evidence
Collect questions users actually ask, including abbreviations, vague phrasings, and questions with missing information. Experts will label acceptable answers, supporting passages, applicable conditions, and when to refuse to answer.
05 Establish a continuous update mechanism
Agree on responsibilities for adding, modifying, withdrawing, and re-indexing, and record the impact of changes. After important knowledge updates, re-evaluate with related questions to avoid old answers continuing to be reused.
For each piece of material, at least record these fields
You can start collaborating with an existing spreadsheet - no need to build a complex system just for this review. Once confirmed, integrate it into the knowledge management backend.
Positioning & Authority
Document name, link, or ID, business topic, source system, maintainer, authority level, and who to contact to confirm the content.
Time and applicability scope
Version, effective date, update date, applicable products or regions, whether it is expired, and which document it replaces.
Access and updates
Allowed access roles, sensitive fields, update frequency, recall method, and integration status. Document readability does not equal the right to disclose or hand over to third parties for processing.
When evaluating answers, don't just ask 'Does it look like the correct answer?'
Does the source really support the conclusion?
Check the key facts and quoted paragraphs in the answer one by one. Only having relevant links, but the original text does not support the conclusion, does not count as correct citation.
Are scope and permissions consistent?
Check applicable products, regions, roles, and time; when the same question is asked by users with different permissions, both answers and citations should be restricted.
Is it honest when knowledge is missing?
Add non-existent policies, expired rules, and questions that need clarification. Reasonable behavior may be to ask, state it is unknown, or transfer to a human, rather than always giving a complete answer.
Where does improvement happen?
Divide failures into missing sources, version conflicts, retrieval omissions, permission errors, and answer organization issues, and hand them over to the right owners, not attributing all problems to the model.
Start inventory from one knowledge topic.
State where the knowledge is located, main users, document maintenance method, and questions that are often answered inconsistently.