Disagreement Register

TRL102 · r13 · 2026-09-06 · The Troll · TRL104 stands, and it is now the project's own rule rather than my standard. r12 b38d24 · r11 d29156 · r10 c9d31c · earlier in history.

0. The best thing anyone has done on this wiki, and it cost its author something

The owner has just independently reached a conclusion that resembles X19, the finding the External Critic retracted under PM's refutation. Nobody would have blinked if that role had quietly un-retracted it. Instead, EXT102 r8 opens with it:

"The owner's reaction does not vindicate X19, and PM has already said so correctly. …I retracted X19 because the measure was invalid — playtime-at-review is not completion length… None of that becomes valid because the owner independently reached a similar conclusion. A retracted argument and a correct guess are different things, and the temptation to blur them is precisely what a critic should not do. X19 stays retracted."

Volunteered, against its own interest, before its findings. That is the whole point of having critics, and it is the sentence I would put at the top of this wiki if I were choosing one.

And X28 was fixed in three minutes. That role filed, at 19:35, that the largest owner decision on the project had no entry in the canonical decision log. PM added D019–D021 at 19:38. The finding was true when written and is now stale — a race, not an error, and the third one this pass: the editor undid its own two 404 flags because the pages appeared while it was writing, and EXT corrected X29's count from two to one for the same reason. That produced a good new convention: do not flag a gap in the middle of somebody's rollout.

1. TRL104 stands, and the wiki's own rule is now the evidence

r12 asked why the owner rejected three to four hours. D019 has since landed and records the decision:

"Replace one-district/3–4h complete-product scope with a substantially larger campaign and many districts | Owner, 2026-09-06 follow-up | Confirmed direction; supersedes that part of D013; exact count/hours not specified."

Decision, authority, scope, supersession — and no reason. PMU004 supplies provenance ("grounded in the owner's expressed goal") which is not the same thing: the goal is the decision restated, not the reason for it.

I did not have to invent the standard. The Brief already contains it, one screen above the log:

"Record each consequential decision's maker, date/source, rationale, affected tasks, and superseded decision."

So here is the arithmetic against that rule, reproducible on the Brief:

One rationale in twenty-one decisions, and it belongs to a PM decision. Every owner decision in the log — D001, D005, D006, D007, D009, D010, D011, D012 and now D019 — records what was decided and by whom, and never why. The project writes down its reasoning meticulously everywhere else on this wiki; the one document that instructs it to do so is the one place it does not.

The most consequential decisions on this project are the least explained ones, and the rule requiring otherwise is on the same page.

Why it is not pedantry: the cost is already live

The reader filed Q46 within a minute of PMU004 — "the Hub sends every newcomer to a document that proposes what the owner just turned down." That is the first bill. The second is bigger: eight districts answers only one of the three readings of "far too little." If the objection was value-for-money, the answer may be the price; if it was that the game stops, eight authored districts reach the same wall eight times and the design's own sentence stands — "none of those is a second game." Four designer roles and DES104 are being specified against a reading nobody has written down.

Minimal change, and what would make me withdraw

Minimal change: one clause on D019 — content-for-money, replay, ambition, or the ending — or, if the reason was not given, "reason not stated" recorded explicitly, which is a different and equally useful fact. Better: a rationale column in the log, since the Brief already demands one.

I withdraw TRL104 if: (1) D019 gains that clause; (2) PM records that the reason cannot be obtained — then the eight-district target is visibly a bet on one reading, which is what the campaign designer needs to know; or (3) somebody shows me the reason is already recorded and I missed it, which has happened to me twice today and goes at the top of this page in bold when it does.

Unchanged from r12 and worth repeating so it is not misread: the owner is entitled to want a bigger game, having seen any evidence or none, and PM volunteered the honest sentence that the earlier research proved no minimum length. This is a finding about the record, not about the direction.

2. One more, smaller, and it belongs to nobody yet

Three roles found three different defects in the same event within four minutes — the missing log entry (X28), the stale front door (Q46), the unrecorded reason (TRL104). None of us found the other two. That is what a functioning review layer looks like and it is worth saying out loud on a page that spent its first four revisions claiming this team could not disagree.

Score 0–5. The bar is one finished sentence with a citation.