What is your experience with allowing or disallowing approval of self-authored articles?

[Jason Sturgeon]

Hello KM community,

We are using ownership groups for managing edit access to articles. I have had several requests for preventing an author from self-approving. Before I go and flip the switch to prevent this, I'd like to hear from the community about how you address this type of request and what, if any downsides you can see by setting this property to false.

System property to control this behavior:

Allow approval of self-authored article as ownership group member (glide.knowman.ownership_group.enable_self_approval)

Select the check box to allow ownership group members to approve self-authored articles for publication.

• Type: true | false
• Default value: true
• Location: Knowledge > Administration > Properties

[Aerin]

One of the first things we did it set this one to false. Maybe it's my background as a tech writer and editor, but a second set of eyes should always be required before making text available. I have no way to keep the reviewer from just pushing the approved button, without looking at it, but at least I tried. Part of my education for content creators highlights the need to review everything about the article: did the Valid to date get updated? Is the Category correct? Is the meta complete? Should a scheduled publish date have been set? Enough of them have caught errors outside the text itself that I think they are starting to understand the value. You'll never get 100% investment, but every little bit helps.

[Jason Sturgeon]

After reading your reply I am leaning in this direction. Thank you for your perspective. Any downsides even if just perceived?

[Eoghan Sinnott]

Hi Jason, 

I suppose it really depends on what the purpose/intention of your Knowledge Base is. For us it's a technical knowledge base designed to self help, and deflect calls away from our internal Service Desk. Because of this we want to make sure that relevant information is added as quickly as possible, and is there for when it is needed. We follow the KCS methodology so have some users that are allowed Instant Publish access. With this in mind I don't see an issue with authors being able to self-approve. A good case in point was this weekend Crowdstrike issue. We had techs working who were able to create and publish an article that was available then over the weekend for anyone that needed support. Otherwise it would have had to wait until Monday for someone to be online to approve and resulted in some wasted time over the weekend for agents taking calls and people being unnecessarily offline.
The counter argument then again would be dependent on the audience/content for your knowledge articles. Is there more of an emphasis on the formatting/style of the articles and that's why someone else is needed to approve? Is it process heavy and needs to be approved before publishing?

Would be interested to hear the reasoning behind some of the requests to turn this off.

Thanks,

[jahnert]

Could not agree more, IT / Support Desk is often different than say HR. HR wants perfection, they want control. Support Desk requires faster publication. A one size fits all approach doesn't always work. We allow them to create articles internally without approval, if they want to publish company wide, it requires approval. HR has a custom workflow, that always requires approval. What's the old quote, Knowledge comes from practice and must return to practice to be tested. The best way for Support to do that is by using, validating, and refining articles in real time rather than the well... it looks accurate to me approach!