content-deduplication-disciplinelisted

# Content Deduplication Discipline ## What A practice for preventing and eliminating duplicate content within technical documents, ensuring each fact has exactly one authoritative location with references pointing to it rather than copies of it. ## Why Duplicate content creates **maintenance nightmares**: - Update one copy, forget the others → contradictions - Reader finds conflicting versions → trust erosion - Document bloat → harder to navigate - Search results polluted → wrong instance edited The **Single Source of Truth (SSOT)** principle applies to documents just as it does to databases: each fact should live in exactly one place. ## Duplication Patterns | Pattern | Description | Risk Level | |---------|-------------|------------| | **Verbatim copy** | Exact same paragraph in 2+ places | 🔴 HIGH — guaranteed to diverge | | **Paraphrase copy** | Same information, different words | ⚠️ MEDIUM — subtle contradictions | | **Summary + detail** | Executive summary repeats detail section | ✅ LOW if summary clearly references source | | **Table + prose** | Same data in table and paragraph form | ⚠️ MEDIUM — update one, forget other | | **Cross-document** | Same content in multiple files | 🔴 HIGH — no linking mechanism | ## How ### Prevention: Write Once, Reference Elsewhere ```markdown # WRONG: Duplicate the data ## Section 2.5 There are 1,727 SPs across 22 databases. ## Section 6.4 The 1,727 stored procedures across 22 databases require... ## Executive Summary Wi