As a technical writer of 9+ years I can share some concrete experience related to your theory. The theory is right on the money. Assigning an owner and tracking last review date is a very effective practice. Google had a great system (go/fresh-source) in their internal doc infrastructure, g3doc. I learned recently that parts of Microsoft have a similar setup. You put an "owner" field in the YAML frontmatter of your doc (the value is the username of the person who owns the doc), as well as a "last review" field (value is last review date). Then you build a reporting system that tracks who is keeping their docs up-to-date and who is not. You can ensure that people don't game it (e.g. just updating the "last review" field without actually looking at the docs) by cross-referencing with other metrics, such as number of bugs opened that are related to that area of the docs.