Use author teams in content

By default, all content in your knowledge base can be edited by all authors. If you'd like to prevent some authors from editing specific categories or articles, restrict those categories or articles to editing by specific author teams only. Authors who belong to the team can still edit the content as normal. Authors who don't belong to the team will be able to see the content, but they can't edit it.

Author team restrictions set at the category level are inherited by all articles in that category. You can choose to restrict an article or subcategory to a subset of those author teams. Refer to Inherited author team restrictions for more information on how inherited author team restrictions work and how you can further refine inherited author team restrictions.

The information below varies based on whether you're using our 2026 new editor or old editor.

To figure out which instructions to follow:

1. Open any article for editing.
2. If the lefthand navigation is collapsed and there's a link near the top of the page to Switch to old editor, follow the New editor documentation.
   
3. If the lefthand navigation is expanded and the top of the editor and the righthand column have a heavier grey background, follow the Old editor documentation.

Here are side-by-side examples of the new editor and the old editor:

Sample New editor

Sample Old editor

If you restrict a category to Restrict content to author team, that restriction is automatically applied to all articles within that category.

This means several things:

Articles only editable by the category's author teams

Articles within this category will all be editable by only the author teams set for the category overall. You cannot add additional author teams to individual articles; they must be added at the category level.

If restrictions have been set at the category level, the article's Restrict Editing to Author Teams section will only list the author teams that the whole category is restricted to. (There won't be any checkboxes for other author teams in your knowledge base).

Let's say we're working in a knowledge base with three author teams:

• Burrowing owls
• Owlets
• Night owls

If I restrict a category to Burrowing owls and Owlets, when I open an article within that category, I'll only see those two author teams listed in the checkboxes:

Sample article with inherited author team restrictions for Burrowing owls and Owlets

When collapsed, the summary for the section will list these inherited teams (unless you have further refined the author team restrictions; refer to Third, below). So in this case, the collapsed section summary text will list both Team C and Team A.

No action needed to restrict article to category's teams

I don't need to select any boxes for the article to be restricted to all the author teams as the category: it already carries the same restrictions.

Use article's Restrict Editing to Author Teams to further refine those restrictions

The checkboxes in the article editor instead allow you to further refine the author team restrictions.

If I make no selections, the article will only be editable by the author teams inherited from the category (in this case, the Burrowing owls and Owlets teams). Those teams will be displayed in the summary text if the Restrict Editing to Author Teams section is collapsed.

But if I do check one of these boxes, it will further restrict the article so that it is only editable by the team(s) I select. When checkboxes are selected in this way, the summary section will display only the selected teams.

So if I select "Owlets" here, any author on the Burrowing owls will no longer be able to edit this article, though they'd still be able to edit other articles in the category. Only Owlets will be listed in the summary text if the section is collapsed.

Removing author team restrictions depends on how the restriction has been set.

Author team restrictions can be set:

• Directly on an article itself, using the Restrict Editing to Author Teams checkboxes
• Inherited from the category the article's within, no further refinements (no boxes checked in the article's Restrict Editing to Author Teams section)
• Inherited from the category the article's within AND further refined/limited to a subset of those teams (boxes checked in the article's Restrict Editing to Author Teams section)

Direct restrictions

Remove author team editing restrictions that have been added to the article directly (and aren't inherited from the category) following these steps:

1. Open the article or category in the editor.
2. Uncheck the team's checkbox in the Restrict Editing to Author Teams section of the editor.
3. Be sure to Save your changes.

Inherited restrictions, no refinements

If an article has inherited author team restrictions from the category, the only way to remove the author team restriction is to remove it from the category.

As long as no Restrict Editing to Author Teams boxes have been checked in the article itself, removing the team from the category will totally remove the author team restriction from the article. If any boxes have been checked in that section for the article, follow instructions in the next section.

Inherited restrictions with refinements

If an article has inherited author team restrictions from the category AND has boxes checked in the Restrict Editing to Author Teams section, removing the restrictions is a little more complicated.

In this scenario, you'll need to remove the author team:

• From the category's Restrict Editing to Author Teams section
• From the article's Restrict Editing to Author Teams section