9 The all-important narrative
Having a consistent and engaging narrative makes the content worth reading.
Information in text is presented serially, so it needs a plan to make it have meaning. That plan is the narrative. It ties together each piece of information to build an evolving context that prepares the reader for what follows, eventually getting to a conclusion that is a logical outcome of what was presented before. This makes the narrative all-important in how the content is processed by the reader.
Narratives occur at all levels of a body of information, whether they be for the structure of a site, the sequence of articles in a category, the sequence of content in an article, or within each of its sections or subsections, and down to individual paragraphs and introductions. To have a coherent body of knowledge, all the narratives have to form a singular hierarchy, with each fleshing out some part of the next level up.
To maintain consistency, narratives have to be carefully curated, by being willing to both pare out what does not add to the narrative, and add content that the narrative demands. This is something bloggers generally do not have to bother with, as each article is just what they are interested with at the time, but disappear into a chronological waste-dump after their brief airing. Narratives are effectively a content plan which sets the scope of all content within it, and so needs to be carefully managed to keep the content within scope.
Each step in the narrative will be more coherent and believable if its causal link to the previous is shown. When the reader can follow the steps unfold because of the causal links, it will appear like solid reasoning to them rather than what might otherwise seem like a dumping of reactionary opinions otherwise. This is what builds trust, even for topics for which there might not be much proof.
This does not mean there cannot be some organic growth of topics from the bottom up, but they will still need to be integrated into the levels above them. This is how a body of knowledge evolves, but it does involve decisions as to how to accommodate the divergent content. It could be handled by adding a new category, modifying the name and description of an existing category to be more inclusive, or in the opposite direction, need its own subsite or subdomain if the content is a significant change in scope or depth than the rest of the site.
The narrative at each level must be self-contained so that it makes logical sense at its own level, but adds value to the level above it by explaining or illustrating a point made in it. This trans-level relevance is what makes a body of knowledge coherent and integrated. Even at lower levels, this approach does the same for them. This necessitates periodic evaluation and maintenance to keep the content relevant and coherent. Narratives are living things that need attention to be relevant to where the area of knowledge being written about is currently at.
Even historical contexts are continuously being updated as a result of more recent research, so a site can lose relevance if it is not kept astride of later developments. Unless the site is about the latest gossip, that does not mean having to be manically reading all matter of new information. It is about seeing trends and identifying what will be making material future changes to the area of understanding, so that the content of the site is adapting to what is really relevant, rather than of transient and minor interest. That makes site maintenance more manageable.