A knowledge base is a structured repository of information used by individuals or organisations to consolidate what they know about a topic, product, customer, or process.
Why it matters
Knowledge bases come in three forms: **internal** (employee-facing wikis like Confluence, Notion), **customer-facing** (help centres like Zendesk Guide, Intercom), and **personal** (individual wikis, second brains). Each has different authoring, access, and maintenance models.
The biggest hidden cost of a knowledge base is staleness. Information goes out of date the moment it's written; the people who knew it best leave; the references rot. A useful knowledge base requires either active stewardship or an automatic update mechanism.
How Pith relates
Pith is a personal knowledge base that updates automatically as you save articles — there is no stewardship cost because there is no manual authoring. For internal team knowledge, Confluence and Notion remain the right tools; Pith is the inbound-research layer that feeds them.
See also
Last reviewed: 10 May 2026 · Licensed CC BY 4.0 · cite freely with attribution to Pith.