Living document

This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. Find sources: "Living document" – news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR (June 2020) (Learn how and when to remove this template message)

A living document, also known as an evergreen document or dynamic document, is a document that is continually edited and updated.^[1] An example of a living document is an article in Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia that permits anyone to freely edit its articles; this is in contrast to "dead" or "static" documents, such as an article in a single edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica.

A living document may or may not have a framework for updates, changes, or adjustments. This type of document without proper context can change away from its original purpose through multiple uncontrolled edits. This can encourage open collaboration within the network, but in some cases there can also be stagnation if no one takes on the initiative of updating the work. One reason why initiative is not taken to update the document could come from a sense of ambiguity.

However, a living document may evolve through successive updates, be expanded as needed, and serve a different purpose over time.^[2] Living documents are changed through revisions that may or may not reference previous iterative changes. The rate of document drift depends on the structure of the original document, or original intent of such document, or guidelines for modifying such document.