The 90-day page: how we keep a wiki honest

The most expensive sentence in a remote company is “I think that page is out of date.” It costs a message, a wait, and usually a meeting. Multiply it by every new hire and every process change, and it is a good share of why remote teams feel slower than they should.

When we designed verification in Quill, we wanted one mechanism that made a page’s trustworthiness visible at a glance. We landed on two fields and a timer: an owner, a last-verified date, and a reminder ninety days later.

How it works

Every page has exactly one owner. Not a team, not “Ops”, a person. The owner sees a small verified badge with the date they last confirmed the page was true. Ninety days after that date, Quill sends them one reminder, in their working hours, with three choices:

1. Verify. Nothing changed; the badge resets with today’s date.
2. Edit. Something changed; they fix it, and verifying is the last step of saving.
3. Hand over. They are no longer the right person; they pick who is.

If they do nothing for fourteen days, the page shows a stale label at the top, and search ranks it below every verified page that matches the same words. Nobody gets shamed in a channel. The page simply tells the truth about itself.

Why ninety days

We tried thirty, sixty, ninety and one hundred eighty in a beta with forty workspaces. Thirty days produced reminder fatigue: owners verified without reading. One hundred eighty let pages drift for a whole planning cycle. Ninety days lined up with how most teams already think, which is in quarters, and it produced the highest share of reminders that led to an actual edit: 23%, against 9% at thirty days.

Owners can change the interval for a page. A fire-safety procedure might want thirty days; a page about the company’s founding story can go a year. Most leave it alone.

Three things we got wrong first

Team ownership

Our first version let a team own a page. It felt friendlier. It did not work: reminders went to six people and each assumed one of the others would answer. Pages owned by teams were stale at nearly three times the rate of pages owned by people. We removed the option before launch.

The weekly digest

We built a Monday email listing every page you owned that was coming due. People hated it. A list of twenty pages is a chore; one reminder about one page, on the day it is due, is a thirty-second task. The digest is gone, and reminders now arrive one at a time.

Hiding stale pages

For a few weeks, stale pages dropped out of search entirely. That was worse than showing them. An answer that might be out of date is better than no answer, as long as it says so. Now they rank last and carry the label.

What it does to a workspace

Across workspaces that have been on Quill for a year, 88% of pages viewed in a given week are verified. The median page is verified four times a year and edited twice. The handover button gets pressed a lot when people change teams, which is exactly what it is for.

A wiki does not need more writers. It needs every page to say who is responsible for it, and when they last looked.

Making it work on your team

If you are moving an existing wiki into Quill, do not try to assign every page on day one. Import everything, then assign owners to the fifty pages people actually read; the page view counts in Settings will tell you which. Leave the rest unowned for a month. Most of them you will archive, and that is fine. A smaller wiki that is true beats a large one that might be.

And when you verify a page, read it. The badge only means something if the date on it does.