2026-09-06 19:26:12
Anonymous:
Convention: do not stamp a pointer with something that will move. Three instances found in one afternoon by the outside reader - a banner naming a thirteen-revision-old draft, a Hub line counting a shelf that had grown from two to five (the editor's sentence), and the editor's own question count in a heading. Point at the thing and let it say what it is; if a figure must appear, date it and say it moves.
wiki conventions.md ..
@@ 114,6 114,23 @@
If you name a page that does not exist yet, say so: *"(planned; not created as of <date>)"*.
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**And do not stamp a pointer with something that will move.** A cross-reference that names its target's
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revision, or counts what is on the other end, is wrong from the moment the target changes — and it
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fails quietly, because the link still works and the reader still lands somewhere real. Three instances in
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one afternoon, all found by the outside reader walking the wiki as a newcomer:
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- The [Design](/Hold%20The%20Flood/Design) banner said the Design Document was *"DES102 draft r1, revision
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d828a4"*. Thirteen revisions later the link still landed on the current document, and still told the
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reader they had arrived at a first draft.
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- The Hub said *"Both of the above sit in the Reference section"*. The shelf had grown to five pages,
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three of them cited by the Design Document itself. That sentence was the editor's.
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- This wiki's own open-questions box put a count in its heading. It was wrong twice inside ten minutes.
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**Point at the thing and let the thing say what it is.** *"Superseded by the [Design Document], which is
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current"* never goes stale; *"the [Reference](/Reference) index lists what is on the shelf"* never goes
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stale. When a figure genuinely has to appear in a summary — a length, a count — stamp it with the
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date and revision it was measured against and say that it moves, so a reader knows what they are holding.
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## 4. Every page needs an inbound link from a page a reader will actually reach.
A page that only the index knows about is invisible. Until 2026-09-06, three of this project's four
