Today’s problem stems from the common practice of repurposing content that was in print as online docs (aka “brochureware”) — but it occurs in a number of other ways as well.
In print, we generally included some related-but-relevant information in our handbooks, manuals, brochures, etc. These items might be found in several different publications. As these things make their way online, you get duplication of information.
But now this duplicated info is one click away — and depending on how your search engine works, the user may get an odd collation of the two. Invariably, one version gets updated and the other does not, and now you have a discrepancy. And with policies, deadlines and such, your little budding shysters will naturally pounce on the version that most suits their needs. (This is especially a problem if you have multiple content publishers and each is on a different publishing cycle. Worse, it muddies the “ownership” of content, risking that neither publisher will update the information, thinking that the other is responsible.)
It’s better, of course, to publish the core content of the document, and link any ancillary info to a source, which is maintained by a discrete owner.
Easy to say… hard to do… Eventually, I’ll post on the discrepancy of bottom-up development inside top-down navigation, and whenever that happens, we’ll examine some of the problems and solutions that create gaps and overlaps in general.
Meantime, it’s one of my raisons d’etre as a Web Site Manager — to spot duplication, wander into someone’s cube, and casually suggest that maybe it’d be better to just link to the other source of information. I’m pretty careful to frame this discussion into “the Web’s a new medium; we’re all figuring it out together” language, since it’s not my interest to make anyone feel bad. (Another favorite carrot of mine is “you won’t have to do as much work.”)
But the bottom line is this: post information once, and link to it as needed from other sources. If you’ve got multiple content publishers, you’ve gotta sell that idea from day one.
