Coping with copies: Strategic dimensions of reuse and duplication

When are copies of content appropriate, and how should you manage copies? Should content ever be repetitive?  Is duplicative content always bad? Answers to these questions are typically provided by specialists: CMS implementers (developers skilled in PHP or another CMS programming language), SEO experts, or webmasters. Specialists tend to focus on technical effort or performance—the technical penalties—rather than strategic issues of how people interact with messages and information—the users’ goals. Discussions become overly narrow, with important issues taken off the table.  But if we only consider the technical dimensions, we can lose sight of the human factors at play. Content exists to be read.