Preparing material for an import

An import is only as good as the material behind it. Send what your team has already written for other people, grouped the way the product is shaped.

Group by the product, not by your wiki

This is the one piece of advice here that came from a measurement rather than taste. Sent one excerpt per page, the material comes back as your table of contents.

Twelve pages pasted, one excerpt each	The same material in four condensed excerpts
A page on billing, a page on invoices, a page on refunds, a page on integrations, a page on data handling, a page on onboarding, and so on, each sent as its own excerpt.	Everything about money in one excerpt. Everything about the people who use it in another. Everything about what it connects to in a third. Everything about how data is held in a fourth.
Comes back as twelve directions, named after your pages (“Integrations”, “Data handling”, “Implementation”). That is your filing, not your product.	Comes back as four directions, which is what the product is actually for.

Ten excerpts is a ceiling, not a target. Five or six full ones read better than ten thin ones. If what you have will not group into ten, it is material for more than one import.

Good and bad excerpts

Good: something a person wrote for other people.

• Release notes for what shipped
• The README
• A help or onboarding page
• The list of screens or commands

Bad:

• A whole PDF. Send the passage that matters.
• Planned work, written up as though it shipped
• Source code
• Marketing copy

The summary

One or two sentences on what the product is. Everything else is read against it, so make it the sentence you would say to a new teammate on their first day.

When something is refused

Nothing is ever quietly trimmed, so a half-read product is never the result.

Refusal	What to do
Over the limits (more than 10 excerpts, or more than 32,000 characters in all)	Condense. Group excerpts by the part of the product they describe, or split the material by topic and send the most important part first.
The same document twice	Send it once. A duplicate doubles the weight the draft gives it.
A file instead of words	A pasted PDF or spreadsheet export arrives as bytes, not prose. Paste what the document says.
An import with no material	A summary on its own gives nothing to describe. Add the README or the product docs.
“Try again”	The model had a bad minute. Send the same material again; nothing was lost and nothing was half-written.
A draft still filling in	It cannot be sent, saved over or re-sent until it has landed. Wait, and open it again.