No longer need an article to be considered required, or mess up on a Start Date? You can remove the Start Date or the required option and still retain all historical data.
Setting your knowledge base to be fully public, entirely private, or a mixture of public and private is just the first step to determining who can access your content. Those are broad content controls. For more fine-grained content controls, use ...
If you've had trouble with the article editor stripping out part or all of a custom script, never fear! Follow the instructions here to add the script to a snippet.