Deleting outdated article versions - reasons not to?

[Barry_W]

Hi All,

I need to delete a large volume of knowledge articles from a specific knowledge base, but I'm retaining around 200 of these by moving newly created drafts of them to a different knowledge base. The old versions of these articles will be deleted with the rest.

Has anyone any experience of deleting old versions of articles (leaving just the most recently created draft) and in particular, reasons why I shouldn't do this?

The testing I've done suggests it shouldn't cause issues with the articles I wish to retain, but any voices of experience would be gratefully received!

Thanks,
Barry.

[Kim27]

Ask yourself why you enabled version history. For us, we may need to audit why an agent took a specific action on a ticket and look back at the version history of an article based on the date the ticket was actioned. 

Is there a reason you are choosing to recreate the knowledge as opposed to changing the KB on the existing article? The risk of recreating articles is losing the version history as well as breaking any links to that article. 

[Lesley W]

This was exactly what I was thinking when I saw this as well. History can be really important and that is exactly what the version control(and those outdated articles) is for.

[Barry_W]

Thanks for the input Kim. The circumstances around this are unique, in that its related to a restructure, so isnt something we intend repeating. Completely agree with your points about the value of version history/control.

Whilst I agree it isn't ideal to delete the older versions, I'm just trying to work out if functionally it will cause issues down the line, as in, problems creating new versions, approval workflows etc. We're not recreating the knowledge as such. We are creating new drafts of a sub-set of the articles then moving them to a new knowledge base, however this doesn't move the older versions, which are therefore likely to be deleted as part of the data clean-up operation we need to perform.

[jfranche]

Reflecting on this older post.  I think it is a very good question.  Our KB now has thousands of Outdated articles (older versions) that have very little use now.   Its not a big deal, but I am wonder if, just for hygiene, anyone applies any sort of logic\script to maybe just keep older version from say the last year?