You've inherited 340 articles. You know roughly forty of them are wrong. You have Thursday.

The instinct is to start at the top of the list and improve things. It feels productive, it's the thing your job title implies, and it is almost always the wrong first move.

Improving is the most expensive option you have

Rewriting an article means reading it, working out what's changed in the product since, checking with someone who knows, rewriting, re-screenshotting, and publishing. Call it two hours if nothing surprises you.

Deleting it takes four minutes.

Both of those are legitimate outcomes. Only one of them is treated as the default, and that's why backlogs like yours never move.

The four fates

Every old article has exactly four possible futures, and naming them makes the decision much faster than staring at the text.

Keep it as is. It's still true and people still read it. Nothing to do. You'd be surprised how many land here once you check rather than assume.

Fix it. It's read often and it's wrong. This is the only group that earns your Thursday, and it is always smaller than you expect.

Retire it. Nobody reads it, or the feature is gone. Redirect the URL to the nearest living thing so you keep the search equity, and let it go.

The bit people find hardest

Retiring feels like failure. It isn't. An article nobody reads is not neutral — it still gets indexed, still gets retrieved, and still gets quoted back to a customer by an AI that has no idea it's describing a feature you removed in March.

A smaller help center that is entirely true beats a large one that is mostly true. That's more obvious now than it used to be, because your readership now includes something that cannot tell the difference.

How to actually get through it

Do it one category at a time, not one article at a time. Sort by traffic, because that tells you where being wrong costs the most. And decide the fate before you open the article, not while you're reading it — once you're inside the text, everything looks fixable.

If you just want to know how bad it is before you decide anything, the free health check takes about ten minutes.