What is a knowledge base? A guide for teams, startups and builders

A knowledge base (sometimes abbreviated KB) is a piece of knowledge base software, usually web-based or as a native desktop application, that helps maintain, organize, and retrieve information. This knowledge usually revolves around a product, service, or organization, making it easier for teams to onboard members and maintain information that updates over time.

Knowledge bases are not exclusively for teams; they can also be used by individuals to better organize documents, photos, and other important files. This is especially beneficial today, where an abundance of online information is shared at every waking moment, making personal knowledge bases an ideal way to navigate the noise.

This article will mostly be talking about knowledge bases that favor teams, but many of the subjects are applicable to personal knowledge bases as well.

If you are deciding between a knowledge base and a wiki for internal documentation, see Knowledge base vs wiki (and when you need each).

Internal vs external knowledge bases

Knowledge bases are often classified as either internal or external. While both serve as centralized repositories of truth, their purpose, audience, and security requirements differ significantly. Understanding these distinctions is crucial for choosing the right tools and structuring information effectively.

Internal

Internal knowledge bases are information libraries that describe and document, as the name implies, internal processes, policies and any other information that a team may need to function. This can also include information that helps onboard new team members - for example procedures for setting up a new workspace or documentation on internal conventions.

External

External knowledge bases, on the other hand, serve as a public-facing resources of information for customers, clients, and partners. They provide the necessary context for using a product or service, typically in the form of help center articles, frequently asked question sections and technical documentation. This helps both parties (customers and the responsible team) in that customers can easily find solutions on their own terms while the team does not need to spend time doing support for those customers.

Hybrid

It is also important to note that a knowledge base can combine the previously mentioned types, making it a hybrid knowledge base. This is typically done by keeping a single knowledge base with information filtered based on the audience, where more sensitive information is kept private for internal processes. This makes it easier to keep information up-to-date as overlapping content does not need to live in two separate places, leading to less duplication.

Core features of a knowledge base

While a knowledge base, in its essence, is just a collection of navigable documents, its helpfulness depends largely on how that information is set up and maintained. In theory, a team could manage internal knowledge using basic file storage or standard office suites, but more modern and specialized platforms offer features designed to make handle and maintain the information a lot easier.

In this chapter, we'll go through some of the most common and essential features that most knowledge base software provide.

Structure and hierarchy

As previously mentioned, the role of a knowledge base is to make information readily available and navigable. The most important role in satisfying this requirement is being able to structure the information in a logical and relational way, that makes sense to both the team and the consumers of the content. A well-defined hierarchy provides a mental map, allowing users to navigate through categories, folders, or nested documents to find what they need, even if they aren't sure of the exact search terms. For a practical approach to taxonomy and navigation patterns, see how to structure a knowledge base. Later, we'll discuss some other features that improve this even more when discussing search and discoverability.

While powerful search features are also essential parts of a knowledge base, a clear structure ensures that information is discoverable through simple browsing. This is often achieved through a parent-child relationship between documents, where broad topics branch into more specific subpages, making it easy for the end-user to narrow down their search in order to find what they're looking for.

Search and discoverability

A clear structure helps when you know where to look, but search is what completes a knowledge base as a self-serve library of information. Modern knowledge base systems allow indexing not just titles, but the entire content of every document (recently with AI-assisted natural language search), making it easy to find specific paragraphs for the needed details.

Beyond basic search, discoverability is often enhanced further through tags and document metadata. Tags allow for a non-linear way of organizing information, making it possible to group related documents that live in different parts of the hierarchy. An example could be a "security" tag, which would yield relevant articles from both the Engineering and HR folders simultaneously.

Versioning

To have full confidence in the information a knowledge base contains, it is crucial that the history of how documents evolve is transparent. The main backbone to make this happen is through versioning. Versioning allows teams to track changes over time, see who made specific edits, and revert to previous versions if needed - something well versed in the world of coding through tools like Git. This history is essential for maintaining accuracy and accountability, especially in more high-stakes environments like legal or compliance documentation.

Permissions and access control

As previously mentioned in the chapter about hybrid knowledge bases, in which a single knowledge based is used to serve different audiences, it is crucial for to have a means of handling access control through permissions.

Granular access control ensures that sensitive information, such as HR policies, financial data, or internal roadmaps, is only accessible to authorized (internal) personnel. Modern systems often integrate with existing identity providers (like Google Workspace) to accommodate this, allowing permissions to be managed at a group or role level rather than on an individual basis.

AI and semantic retrieval

Within the past 5 years, technology has seen a significant shift with the introduction of large language models (LLMs). This has has a touch on the world of knowledge bases as LLMs and vector embeddings allow searching through large information bases via natural language search, something often referred to as RAG or retrieval-augmented generation. While the old way of programmatically searching through information would yield a list of links to the respective documents, RAG allows LLM agents to "read" relevant documents and provide a direct answer to a user's question referenced to the original material).

Maintaining your knowledge base

While having a well-structured knowledge base is a great start, its value is only as good as the accuracy of the information it contains. Without care, a knowledge base can quickly become a graveyard of outdated procedures and duplicate data, which can be more damaging than helpful.

To truly be useful, a knowledge base requires clear ownership, proper integration into daily workflows, and regular auditing to catch any information decay. Building a feedback loop where users can report inaccuracies can also benefit knowledge bases - especially external ones. For a deeper dive into these strategies, read our full guide on best practices for maintaining a knowledge base.

Conclusion

A knowledge base is much more than a simple digital filing cabinet - it is an ever-evolving library of information and can be crucial for both teams, customers and individual people. If you're interested in starting your own personal knowledge base, we highly advice checking our Lydie - a modern AI-powered writing workspace that makes setting up and maintaining a knowledge base a breeze.