---
title: "Why Does Content Become Disorganized?"
date: 2013-04-09
description: "$( document ).ready(function() { // Handler for .ready() called. $("
canonical_url: https://idratherbewriting.com/2013/04/09/why-does-content-become-disorganized/
---
# Why Does Content Become Disorganized?
The movement towards disorganization describes the natural direction of many things. Our houses get messy each week and must be cleaned. Our computer desktop gets cluttered and must be ordered. Broken eggs don't naturally reconstitute themselves into whole eggs. Sand (which was once rock) doesn't reshape itself into rock.

Content also resists order at every turn. Even when you have multiple contributors working on the content, you can still end up with a content mess, something that's no better than the metaphoric broken egg or random whirl of sand. In fact, the more contributors you have shaping the content, the more problematic it often gets.

## Single Person Authoring

When *one* person writes an entire body of technical content, the content tends to be more organized than scenarios in which multiple writers contribute to the content, especially when the multiple writers come from different departments, writing at different periods in the company's time, with different writing backgrounds and skill levels, and with a variety of styles.

Yet while single author paradigms sometimes result in tighter coherence of content, the single authoring paradigm doesn't scale and tends to be myopic. Content authored by just one person gets outdated and is often incomplete. Modern workplaces can't discard collaborative authoring and still keep pace in the market. So let's examine three scenarios to explore how collaboratively authoring goes awry, resulting in a content mess.

## Scenario 1: Avoiding Offense

Tina, a technical writer, writes 50 pages of documentation on the company site. A year later, Mark in Marketing comes along and writes another 50 pages. Mark doesn't want to remove the content Tina wrote, so he recreates some of his own in another section of the site with his own navigation.

Sue in Support adds 25 more pages, following a different style than anyone else. Sue leaves the other content alone for the most part, tacking hers on as an addendum. Then Bill, a business analyst, enters the scene and tries to clean up some of the content, but ultimately just shifts it around to other sections and finds space to insert his own.

This is how you end up with a content mess. Everyone adds their own content without seeing and shaping the content as a whole.

This scenario happens frequently with wikis, which is why wikis often degenerate into content junkyards. But it can also happen wherever you have a collaborative authoring scenario.

The basic problem is that content contributors are too kind. Rather than slashing and burning the forest to regrow the trees, they instead plant new patches of forest here and there in their own little areas, and then wonder why the landscape looks like a jungle.

## Scenario 2: Too Much Control

Now let's tweak the variables a little. Tina the technical writer creates 50 pages of content in a help authoring tool (e.g., ACME Builder) and publishes it in a tripane help. Later Sally needs to add another 50 pages. But Tina is the only queen in her kingdom, and doesn't allow outsiders to have tool control, so Sally decides to publish her content on a Google Apps site instead.