How to read a knowledge health report

Citations are only as good as the pile they point at. If two documents say different things, a careful assistant will cite both or flag the conflict. It will not magically know which file you forgot to archive. Cairn includes a knowledge health report for that pile. The report covers duplicates and outdated docs.

This is a reading guide, not a promise that the report is a score.

What the report is willing to say

Knowledge health here means a pass over the indexed material that calls out duplicates and docs that look outdated. We do not publish a matching algorithm, a freshness formula, or a letter grade. If the report lists two files, your job is to open both. The use case Find duplicate documents stops at “the report shows them.” It does not continue into “the app deletes the extra one.”

Outdated is a similar restraint. A document can be old and still be the policy. Source age on an answer is a hint. The health report is a list. You decide which hint is the one that matters for that file.

What you do after you read it

Cairn can take actions, and those actions are approval-gated. Reading a duplicate is not an action. Asking the assistant to do something about it is. The gate means the action waits until you approve it. Do not approve a cleanup you have not opened. The whole point of the report is that you are looking at your own files, including files that arrived through Slack or Notion.

A verified answer is a different mark. It is an answer Cairn labels as verified. The health report is about the corpus. A verified answer is about a response. We do not describe a public review board or a second person inside the company, because the product does not say that. Use the verified mark as a label you can see, and use the citation as the thing you can check.

A pass you can repeat

There is no schedule published on this site. Open the report when the corpus has changed: a migration, a quarter’s worth of notes, a Slack workspace that has become the place where decisions actually happen. Then ask a question you know the answer to, using Search your notes with citations, and see whether the citation lands on the file you just decided was current.

If the citation lands on the outdated twin, the report did its job and the corpus is not finished. Update the file you want people — and the assistant — to hit next time. The guide How to search your files with citations ties this loop to the rest of the glossary, including conflicting sources.

We will not tell you that teams who run this pass “save hours.” We have not measured your team. The report is a list. The list is useful if you read it.