# What is a knowledge base?

A knowledge base is an organised, searchable collection of what a team knows, so people and AI agents find answers without asking.

Updated on 22 October 2026.

## How it works

A knowledge base gathers articles, specs, procedures and decisions in one place, gives each a clear title and an owner, and makes them easy to search and to browse by topic.

Internal knowledge bases serve a team; external ones answer customers. Either way, the value comes from upkeep: an article that is wrong costs more than one that is missing, because people trust it.

## An example

A product team keeps its onboarding guide, the release process, the pricing rules and every past decision in a knowledge base. A new engineer finds how deployments work by searching "deploy", and an AI assistant answers the same question from the same page.

## Common mistakes

- Copying the same information into several articles, which then drift apart.
- Writing articles nobody owns, so nobody updates them.
- Organising only by folder, so related pages never point to each other.

## In Nodary

A Nodary workspace is a knowledge base drawn as a map: documents sit in projects and folders, and links say how they relate. Search covers the words of every document, and each document can be marked canon, exploration, obsolete or superseded, so readers and agents know what still holds.

AI agents read the same documents over MCP, with the permissions of the person who connected them.

**What Nodary does not do:** it does not publish a public help centre on your own domain: a share link shows documents read-only at a nodary.ai address.

- [Getting started](https://nodary.ai/docs/getting-started)
- [Import files into Nodary](https://nodary.ai/docs/import)

Try it on your own documents. The Free plan needs no card. [Create a free workspace](https://nodary.ai/sign-up)

## Sources

- [Knowledge base, Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_base)
- [Knowledge-Centered Service (KCS), Consortium for Service Innovation](https://www.serviceinnovation.org/kcs/)

## Related terms

- [Team wiki](https://nodary.ai/glossary/team-wiki): A team wiki is a set of linked pages that any member can create and edit, so shared knowledge grows from everyone’s contributions.
- [Linked documents](https://nodary.ai/glossary/linked-documents): Linked documents point to each other, so each idea is written once and other documents link to it instead of copying it.
- [Single source of truth: keep one version of every decision](https://nodary.ai/guides/single-source-of-truth): Why documents drift, and seven practices that keep one current version for people and AI agents.

https://nodary.ai/glossary/knowledge-base