Single-sourcing
Keeping one canonical content block and publishing it into many places so copies do not drift apart.
See it
What it is
Single-sourcing keeps one canonical content block and publishes it into multiple outputs. A product warning might feed the help center, manual, in-app guidance, and support script without four teams maintaining four copies. DITA, developed at IBM and now an OASIS standard, is the best-known architecture for writing modular topics and assembling them into different documents.
Reach for it when duplicated facts keep drifting or the same approved instructions must appear across products, formats, locales, or audiences. Model the content as small named components, keep channel presentation outside the source, and define which variations are allowed rather than expecting one paragraph to fit every slot unchanged.
Gotcha: reuse amplifies mistakes as efficiently as it distributes corrections. A canonical block needs an owner, version history, preview in every output, and dependency tracking so editors know where a change will land. Context still matters: a manual and a tooltip may share a fact without sharing the same sentence.
Ask AI for it
Design a single-source content model using DITA topic types for this material. Split it into reusable concept, task, and reference topics with stable IDs, required metadata, owners, review dates, and allowed audience variants. Map each topic to the help center, PDF manual, in-product guidance, and support script. Show one source example and the transformed output for every channel, then list all dependencies that must be previewed when that source changes.