What is "evergreen gardening" in Wikis and other text sites?

It’s pretty simple, actually. Blogs especially, news media sites, and everything that lives and dies by and from the “attention econonmy” are “fire and forget” kind of content sites.

Something is written, and if there’s an update to be made, it’ll be made in a new article, post, status, whatever you’d call it.

This approach has a massive problem: the old stuff is still out there, and without well marked guides to the new stuff (and even then), it will still create “reality”.

This isn’t new. Those among us old enough to remember newspapers might recall times, when a big bold headline grabbed people’s attention and changed outcomes, only for a retraction to be printed weeks later on page 12, in small font, underneath the casual encounter classifieds.

Evergreen 🌱 pages are different. They are never finished, will change when things change (and, ideally, have a changelog for those changes that fundamentally alter the page[1]).

All pages on this site, except for the /blog/ subdirectory are “evergreen” and will change if needed. Below the text you’ll find those evergreen icons telling you, what changed. Just for demonstration purposes, I’ll fundamentally alter this page now, and something should be at the bottom.

🌱 Jun 4 2024 – added a discussion about newspapers.


  1. I don’t think we need a changelog for every time I fix a typo. ↩︎