Article verification lets you indicate whether an article is accurate and current, or whether it needs review and possible revision. If an article is unverified, either through an article verification rule or a manual review, it must be verified by an article owner with publishing permission, agent with publishing permission, or Guide admin.
Verifying an article consists of reviewing it, making any necessary updates, and clicking verify. After you verify an article it will indicate in the article that it has been verified. You can verify articles individually or in bulk.
Verifying individual articles
Articles that need verification are considered unverified until someone verifies the articles.
Guide admins can verify individual articles from the Manage articles list or through the article editor. Article owners and agents with publishing permissions can verify articles through the article editor.
- In Guide, click the Manage articles (
) icon in the sidebar, then click Tasks > Needs verification.
The Needs verification article list opens.
- Click the article you want to verify to open it in edit mode.
- Review the article and make any updates you need to make.
- Click the Unverified drop-down menu in the article header, then select
Verify article.
The article is verified and shown as Verified in the article header.
- In your help center or Guide, navigate to the article that you want to verify, then
click Edit article in the top menu bar.Note: If you received the "It's time to verify your articles" email in your inbox, you can click the article links in the email to navigate directly to the articles.
- Click the Unverified drop-down menu in the article header, then select
Verify article.
The article is verified and shown as Verified in the article header.
- Click Verify article.
After an article is verified, the drop-down menu options change to Unverify and Re-verify. You can click Re-verify to verify an article that has already been verified.
Verifying articles in bulk
Guide admins can verify articles in bulk to remove the need for individual article owners to verify their articles. Once articles are verified, they are removed from the Needs verification list and article owners will stop receiving reminder emails.
- In Guide, click the Manage articles (
) icon in the sidebar, then click Needs verification.
Note: If you received the "It's time to verify your articles" email in your inbox, you can click Verify articles in the email.The Needs verification article list opens.
- Select one or more articles to update.
You can select a maximum of 30 articles at a time. To select 30 items at once, select the check box beside Title at the top of the list.
- Click the Article settings bulk actions menu at the bottom, then select
Verify.
- Click Verify to confirm that you want to verify the selected articles.
The articles are verified and removed from the Needs verification article list. Article owners will no longer receive reminder emails to verify these articles.
31 comments
Casey Birkholz
It would be very helpful to be able to set a start date along with your chosen intervals. We recently moved to ZD and have over 700 articles - I want to be able to set annual review dates but I want to spread the dates that these reviews are due. The only way I'll be able to do that is to set up rules to verify for our various categories and then keep changing them until they land how I want them to - it will take a year of manually adjusting to get this set up. It could take 5 minutes with a Start Date field.
9
Tod Brown
Hi Casey,
My name is Tod with Zendesk Customer Advocacy, and I want to apologize for how long it has taken to get back to you on this.
Regarding the feedback here about the Start Date Field for the rules on reviewing the articles, I am adding this as Product Feedback so our Product Team is aware of the request and suggestion here, as well as the scope of the utility it would provide.
Let us know if you have any questions.
Best regards,
Tod
Shift: Sunday - Thursday
0
Francois Spinnael
Is it not possible to verify only the articles that are open for the public ?
I can only select starting from "signed in user", but its everything that is open to public that I want to be sure that is verified....
0
Ahn Letran
Hey, Francois!
Thanks for creating this feedback. I've checked on this input, and confirmed that you can select the articles that Need verification by selecting under Filters: Permissions > Visible to > Everyone, for public-facing articles. Check all the boxes you need verified, then click the Article settings bulk actions menu at the bottom, then select Verification. Lastly, click Verify to confirm that you want to verify the selected articles. More info here: Verifying articles in bulk
Cheers!
0
Planning Center Online
Who is notified when the article is due to be verified, and how are they notified? The article owner?
0
Phoebe Morin
Hi Reagan!
Indeed, email notifications for article verification are sent to the article owners for the affected articles, and the articles appear in the Needs Verification article list. More information can be found here: Setting reminders to review and verify articles
Cheers!
0
Lauren Smith
Hi Zendesk, when an article is awaiting verification can it still be viewed by users within the Help Centre? Or is it intermittently 'taken off the shelf'?
0
Dave Dyson
0
LVB
Does Zendesk support private comments, or some other mechanism by which my QA Team can provide feedback to our content authors on articles that require verification or review? Or is it necessary to manage the bulk of the authoring and maintenance in a separate platform?
0
Dave Dyson
The Knowledge Capture app may be of help here: Flagging articles with the Knowledge Capture app
0
LVB
@...,
That is a good solution for articles that have already been published, but does not support the pre-publish workflow of Draft → QA Ready → QA Feedback → Published (or thereabouts).
0
Dave Dyson
0
LVB
Dave,
Looks like Eric surfaced the same concern over a year ago. Seems a spreadsheet (or similar) remains the only viable solution.
0
Sabine Hanna
Hi,
the "unverified" marker only displays in the editing screen, not in the actual article view. Is there a way (via a code snippet or similar) so I can make users of my knowledgebase aware that content is not currently verified?
0
Dion
We do not have a way to surface this and verification of articles is an internal feature that is not available to end-users. There is no API or Guide Helper that can achieve this even via custom code.
Regards,
Dion
0
Danilo Brandileone Scardua
Hello, is there any way to verify links to external pages added to the articles?
0
Christine
At this time there's no feature within Zendesk to detect hyperlinks added (both internal or external) to list, change or verify them.
If you have some time, I recommend that you start a post about this in our Feedback - Help Center (Guide). Our Product Managers actively monitors our feedback threads, and conversations with high user engagement ultimately gets flagged by the team for roadmap planning. You can use the Product Feedback Post Template.
0
Jeff Michaelis
Is there an easy way to create a report that shows when articles will need to be verified again based on the current rules?
0
Anne Ronalter
in this case, you can set reminders to review and verify articles.
I have also found a similar post in our Community:
Reporting in Explore on Article Verification
0
Jeff Michaelis
Thanks for the reply, Anne. We already have reminders to review and verify, but that only solves the issue when an article comes to the end of its verification life. It would be great to see when a currently verified article will need to be reverified, for example {Article Name -- last verified date -- next verify date}. This would be helpful for us to forward plan the work that will need to be done to keep up with the maintenance of our articles by seeing what is coming up in the future. I hope I am just missing something, but haven't been able to find this yet. Thanks so much.
4
Josh Johnson
Something I ran into after scratching my head for a moment...Articles can have a "null" verification.
As I was developing a process to delegate article verification duties across multiple departments in our company, I noticed that some articles showed the verification option in the articles Edit screen which others did not. It perplexed me until I realized that it seems we need to deliberately Unverify each new article before the verification option is shown in the article Edit view.
So our intended Guide workflow is Author (Agent or Light Agent) creates article >> Owner reviews and verifies to make ready to publish >> Admin confirms formatting and "voice" of article be publishing >> Article gets reviewed and verified again by Owner again per the Article Verification Rule(s).
The hang-up is that the new article must first be located in the All articles view and marked as Unverified before the Owner is able to see verification option/function in the article Edit view.
Am I missing a way to make all new articles Univerified by default?
0
Afabio Junior
Related to your concern, you can manually unverify articles right after creating them manually as per the image below:
There is no specific setting to make new articles unverified automatically since this is not the use case it was designed for. At the moment, that's the closest workaround we can offer. Otherwise, you'd have to build a really generic rule that catches articles a couple of weeks later.
0
Christian Becker
Hello,
is it planned, that in the future we can verify the articles via API call? Because we have currently over 20.000 articles and need now to verify them in 30 item batches, which is very annoying. We know that this articles are good quality etc. so no manual verification is necessary for us.
Looking forward hearing from you
Christian
2
Steven Aranaga
Is there a reason that someone needs to have publish permissions to verify an article? I have a team that wants to review articles when needed, but often do not need any update. We want to control who can publish a new version, but they should be able to verify it if there are no changes needed.
3
Joyce
There's currently no option to give agents only verification permission. This setting is only visible when an agent has publishing permission.
I understand the importance of allowing your agents to verify an article without the ability to publish changes to it on your workflow. I encourage you to create a new post in the Guide Product Feedback topic in our community to engage with other users who have similar needs and discuss possible workarounds.
0
Christina hernandez
+1 to everything Jeff Michaelis said. We need to be able to see and report on:
This is important to those of us who manage the content audit and need to plan for the future. We need to be able to see how many articles will fall into an unverified status at any point in time throughout the year. We have rules set up to verify higher priority articles every 3 - 6 months, and others 1x per year. At this point, I can't tell when ANY of my articles are up for verification again in Zendesk, so I have to manually keep a spreadsheet with dates to know what to expect next year. Getting an email right before the article verification expires is insufficient.
Additionally, I may have verified an article 2 months ago but due to product releases, go back and fully revise the article, then re-verify it. That will change my next verification date. I shouldn't have to manually keep track of these dates.
0
Jens Herlevsen
Hi,
This article states that “Article owners and agents with publishing permissions can verify articles”. But in our Guide instance, the owners are not able to verify their articles.
They also cannot due it from the “Bulk” actions, where “Verification” is greyed out.
What can be the cause? :-)
0
Agis Kalogiannis
Hi Zendesk team.
Can a light-agent verify an article if they get the notification email or they need to have special access, like guide admin, or agent?
0
Destiny
I appreciate you getting in touch regarding this unusual issue where your Account owner is unable to verify articles on your account. To address this matter effectively, I suggest contacting our Support team for in-depth troubleshooting. Here's a guide on Contacting Zendesk Customer Support
We are very eager to help you resolve this.
0
Destiny
I appreciate your question. It's my understanding that light agents might indeed have the capacity to verify articles, although to be certain, I would advise conducting a test to confirm this functionality. Additionally, you can find comprehensive details on the permissions and limitations of light agents in Zendesk at the following resource: Understanding and setting light agent permissions.
I trust this will provide the clarity you need.
0