When you go to a blog or website and you can see the content is out of date, it's a signal that the company has abandoned the site and you aren't likely to come back. If you goal is to drive traffic to your site, you need to keep your content current. The same is true for a Wiki. If it suffers from stale content, your readers won't take you seriously.
Matt Wiseley from the Wiki tool vendor: EditMe [1] writes in his "Edit Your Web" blog, that if you abandon your Wiki, it's akin to an abandoned building and your "dead pages that are long past their useful life and need to be deleted." He points out that Wiki tools can help you mark a page as "deleted," while still keeping a record of the page for audit purposes. This lets you make the page disappear from the public view, but still keep them for people who need a history of the Wiki contents for whatever reason.
Wiseley is right that you have to pay attention to your web properties, whether internal or external and make sure that someone is responsible for continually monitoring and updating the content. If the content gets old, it puts up a sign that you have abandoned your property and you shouldn't be surprised that content no longer serves its purpose to position you in certain fashion such as an expert or as a helpful source of information for people who use your product service.
For more information:
- see Wiseley's blog post [2]
Related Articles:
Blogs news from FierceContentManagement [3]
Links:
[1] http://www.editme.com/?affid=fc
[2] http://www.edityourweb.com/2009/02/wiki-spring-cleaning/
[3] http://www.fiercecontentmanagement.com/tags/blogs