Winnow for Confluence

What it looks for

• Contradictions. Two pages that cannot both be true — a refund window given as 30 days on one page and 45 on another, a fee table that disagrees with the worked example beneath it.
• Claims that have expired. A figure, a date or a rule that has since changed, where the page still asserts the old one.
• Duplicates. The same guidance in three places, drifting apart.
• Housekeeping. Broken links, unreachable pages, missing owners. Kept separate from the above, because burying a correctness problem under fifty tidiness problems is how a list stops being read.

Every finding carries the sentence it rests on, so you can judge it in a couple of seconds. If a finding is wrong, mark it "Not an issue" and it will not come back.

Setting up

1. Install from the Atlassian Marketplace. Winnow appears under Apps in Confluence.
2. Grant access to the spaces you want read. This is the one step that needs doing per space, and it is deliberate — Winnow cannot give itself permission to read your content. In each space go to Space settings → Users, choose Add people, find the Winnow app and add it as a Viewer. The dialog defaults to Collaborator; Viewer is enough, and less.
3. Switch the space on. Open Winnow from the Apps menu and turn on the spaces you want watched. Each has a Grant link straight to the right settings page if you have not done step 2 yet.
4. Wait for the first scan. Turning a space on starts one immediately.

How scanning works

The first scan of a space reads everything. After that, Winnow re-checks nightly and only looks closely at pages edited since the last scan, which is why the daily cost of running it is a fraction of the first one.

Scans run one at a time across your whole site. If several spaces are queued, each says Waiting to scan and starts when the one ahead of it finishes. A large space takes several minutes and reports as it goes.

The two buttons

• Check for changes reads only pages edited since the last scan. Fast, and the one to use routinely.
• Full rescan re-reads everything. Use it after a bulk import or a large migration.
• Stop scan halts a scan in progress. Anything it has already found is kept; the pages it had not reached are simply left for next time.

Reading the report

Open a space and choose Content health in its sidebar.

The queue is ordered by how much the problem matters, not by how confident the model is. Critical and major findings are correctness problems: the page tells a reader something untrue. Minor findings are housekeeping and are hidden by default behind a toggle.

The score out of 100 is a summary of the space, not a target. A space full of accurate pages with no owners will score lower than its content deserves; a space with two dangerous contradictions and nothing else wrong will score higher than it should. Read the queue, not the grade.

On each page

Pages that Winnow has flagged carry a note in the byline, beneath the title, so the person editing a page sees the problem where they can fix it rather than having to visit a dashboard.

What it will not do

• It never edits your content. Every recommendation is for a person to carry out.
• It never reads a space you have not granted it access to.
• It does not record who wrote or last edited a page. Winnow is not a tool for finding out whose fault something is.

Getting help

Email support@ryanit.io. Include the space name and, if it is about a specific finding, the page title — we cannot see your content, so we can only help with what you tell us.

Security issues go to security@ryanit.io; see the security policy.