Knowledge Article not showing option to Checkout

[Eoghan Sinnott]

Hi, 

I am encountering some very strange behavior with one Knowledge Article and wondering if anyone has encountered something similar. First off, the article is published, in date, I have the correct contribute access (Knowledge admin). 

There is a published article that nobody is able to checkout. It is in version 4.0, and for some reason the version 1.0 has disappeared. It isn't viewable in the list view if you filter by "Number".
 
and doesn't show from the Portal view in the Version History.

If I check the Article Version from the Related List, it shows version 0.01 - 1.01 but they cannot be opened, and are all actually showing as being V2.0.

I can use the list view to change the Workflow back to draft and then make Edits before publishing, but I would prefer to understand what the issue is.

Thankful for any help, 

Eoghan 

[Mark Manders]

These updates show 2015 (7 years ago). It could be that something went wrong when activating versioning? You probably won't find what went wrong back then, because logging simply won't exist anymore. Your current version is also 4 years old, but was updated a while back. Do you know what was updated? Could it be it was retired and somebody did something to get it unretired, breaking the flow? 
Check the xml of the article on state/workflow/active/etc. 

The only time I didn't have the checkout button show up, was when the article wasn't published anymore or when a newer version already existed, but was not published yet.

[Eoghan Sinnott]

Hi Mark, 

We would have had versioning enabled before then, and also have older versions of articles that are working as expected. 
An update was made to the Valid to date last time around, so there wasn't a new version created, as we have Valid to date set to be a minor field that can be edited without checking out. 
I have gone through the Edit history and looked through the list and calendar view and can't see anything that has caused this to happen.

[Mark Manders]

Maybe you had versioning before, but OOB versioning was introduced with the Paris release (Q3'20), so even though it doesn't explain why it's not working now, it could explain the weird things you see from before that time.

[Kim27]

I've seen this happen when we've migrated articles from one instance of ServiceNow to another. Our workaround was to create a new article via "Insert and Stay" and retire the old article.

Notably, in 2015, ServiceNow rolled out knowledge v3. It may be possible the upgrade broke the versioning.

Do you happen to have Ownership Groups enabled? OGs limit who can edit articles.