Doc Archaeology

Doc Archaeology

Excavate aging documents for staleness, dead links, process drift, phantom dependencies, and obsolete examples.

Five categories of doc decay

  1. Stale Facts — claims about state-of-the-world that have changed
  2. Dead Links — URLs that 404, redirect to unrelated destinations
  3. Drift from Current Process — procedures that no longer reflect actual practice
  4. Phantom Dependencies — scripts, files, tools, people that no longer exist
  5. Obsolete Examples — code snippets reflecting prior API or UI

Five-pass workflow

  1. Last-Updated Lens — estimate age, catalog time-sensitive claims, set decay risk (low/medium/high)
  2. Fact-Check Pass — verify each claim against current state
  3. Link-Check Pass — verify every URL; flag auth-gated as “unverified”
  4. Process-Check Pass — verify procedures against current practice at step level
  5. Dependency-Check Pass — check scripts, files, tools, channels, people

Findings table

# Category Location What the doc says Current reality Severity Action

Severity: Critical/Misleading → High/Outdated → Medium/Cosmetic → Low/Historical

Salvage decisions

Anti-patterns