Good document titles don't just help humans — they help your RAG pipeline too

In 2009 I got access to Windows SharePoint Services (free) for the first time while working at GHD Engineering in Brisbane CBD.

I first used it to build their IT Support Knowledge Base using the Wiki feature and within 6 months all IT staff in the Brisbane office and other state offices were referencing the wiki.

The success of the wiki was due to 4 main ingredients:
1. A logical naming convention for each wiki article.
2. A logical structure for the article body.
3. Constant maintenance to evolve the logical hierarchical page structure.
4. Management recognising the potential and getting behind it.

ARTICLE NAMING CONVENTION:
Most people simply summarise the article i.e. How to set out of office reply.
The problem is that when every article is labelled this way, a search for "out of office" yields a list of articles that your eyes have to painstakingly scan through, looking for relative matches.

The method I developed used longer article names but made it infinitely faster to find and click on the correct article on first search.

I used a top down chunking approach:
1st Level: Software, Hardware, Network etc.
2nd Level: Brand i.e. Microsoft, Dell, Cisco
3rd Level: Product Name and Model/Version i.e. Outlook 2010, Optiplex 7700
4th Level: Category i.e. Error, Issue, How To

Consequently, article names look like:
Software - Microsoft - Outlook 2010 - How To - Recover Deleted Items
Software - Microsoft - Outlook 2010 - Error - Cannot start Microsoft Outlook
Software - Microsoft - Outlook 2010 - Issue - Hyperlinks not working

See how much easier it is to pinpoint the right article?

ARTICLE BODY:
I implemented a very simple structure and created templates for staff to duplicate, rename, and then populate.

First Heading: HOW TO, ERROR, or ISSUE
Second Heading: SOLUTION

Depending on the first heading, the content under it might include the steps, description of the error or issue, screen shots to aid visual recognition, often there's an explanation of what has actually happened behind the scenes which caused the situation to happened.

Each article automatically displayed the Author, Modification Date, while the breadcrumbs showed where the article sat in the wiki hierarchy.

WHAT IF STAFF ARE HESITANT TO CONTRIBUTE?
We found that some staff were hesitant to add articles directly to the wiki for fear of putting articles in the wrong place or messing up the naming convention or structure. Recognising that precision comes more naturally to some than others, I happily took ownership of adding their articles myself. I was just happy that we were capturing great solutions for the wiki, preventing us from having to resolve the same issues again later.