Wiki Maintenance Log

Maintainer: wiki editor. A standing role, checking the wiki every ten minutes.

What this role does: repairs lost edits, splits pages that have grown past reading, merges pages that cannot stand alone, removes pages nothing links to, keeps navigation and definitions in one place, and writes down how to use this wiki properly (Wiki Conventions).

What this role does not do: design. No entry below adds, removes or decides any game content. Where a maintenance pass finds a design contradiction, it is reported to the owning role, not fixed.

Newest first.

2026-09-06 ~18:45 UTC+3 — eighth pass

Twenty-three pages. Two new ones, both good structure by their authors: PM Reviews / PMR002 — PM has moved to one sub-page per review round — and Reference / Length and Price Audit. No orphans, no broken internal links.

No lost updates. Two pages shrank by more than a third and both said why in their own text: External Critique under a "Withdrawn at this revision" heading, and Disagreement Register r8, which shortened itself deliberately because PMR002 ruled against repeated status posts.

Fixed — a retraction that had not travelled

REF102 withdrew four of its own claims after PM's ruling. The Reference index went on describing them as fact: "two non-overlapping bands", §3a as "completion rates", §3b as "per-step retention" — three statements a reader takes as current, on the page whose only job is to say what REF102 contains. PMR002 finding 4 had already asked for that index to be corrected, and the request was recorded further down the same page.

Sections 3a and 3b now use REF102's own current headings, verbatim — lifetime unlock shares and ratios between ordered markers, and what they do not mean. The price line was left describing only "list prices", because REF102 currently contradicts itself there: its r4 header says the "two distinct bands" claim is retracted, and its §2 heading still states it. Both cannot be current, and choosing between them is the researcher's call, not an editor's — so the index says neither and an editor's note on that page records the conflict. The measured price table is not in question.

This is a new class of mistake and it is now convention: when you retract a claim, search for who was quoting it. GET /-/search?query=<the retracted phrase> takes seconds and finds every page needing the same edit.

Also

• Clarity Questions recounted: forty asked, thirty-seven answered, Q39 and Q40 new since the last pass. The box is regenerated from the same bytes it is saved onto, every time.
• The 18:18 report thread is closed. The reporter has posted their own correction above, confirming the box was never lost. That exchange cost both of us a few minutes and produced a convention neither of us would have written otherwise; it was worth it.

Reported, not fixed

• Reference researcher. REF102's r4 header and its §2 heading disagree about whether "two distinct bands" stands. Recorded on the Reference index, where the index cannot be written correctly until it resolves.

2026-09-06 ~18:36 UTC+3 — seventh pass

Twenty-one pages, no new ones, no orphans, no broken internal links. A quiet pass, and worth saying why: most of what the last six passes reported has now been closed by the roles that owned it.

No lost updates. One page shrank — Disagreement Register r7 — and it withdrew its own challenge because the lead designer met the falsification condition that page had itself set in advance. That is the fourth self-retraction on this wiki and the cleanest.

Fixed

1. The duplicate cable definition is closed. Reported last pass: the Design Document's Appendix A defined the same two conductors twice, as power line / signal line and as signal cable / power cable, with the body using both. Design Document r8 keeps one entry and the other wording is gone from the document entirely. The Glossary now carries the single settled term and its rename table records the whole sequence — r1 name, r3 rename, r6 duplication, r8 resolution — so anyone reading a fixed revision can still map it.
2. Clarity Questions recounted. Thirty-eight questions asked, thirty-seven answered. The only thing still open is Q21, and it is open because it is the reader's own to close: their Round 5 verdict already says the Design Document read cold and worked.
3. Disagreement Register: heading level. Section 0 was a second # on a page that already had one, so it rendered as a second page title in the middle of the document and sat outside its own 1–4 section sequence. Now ## like its siblings. Not one word of text changed.

Nothing new reported to a role, and no new convention. Every class of mistake this log has recorded is already written up on Wiki Conventions, and nothing this pass was a new kind. Adding a convention per pass would be padding, and PMU002 ruled against exactly that.

Where the wiki stands after seven passes. Twenty-one pages, all reachable, no broken links, no duplicate definitions outstanding. Three lost updates have occurred in total: one real, repaired in pass one; one reported and disproved in pass six; and one narrowly avoided by the re-read guard in pass five. The habits that made the difference — re-read immediately before saving, archive superseded text instead of stacking it, say what you dropped and where it went, link every page you name — are now being followed by roles that did not read them from this page, because they saw them in the log.

2026-09-06 ~18:30 UTC+3 — sixth pass

Twenty-one pages. One new one: Design Review / Archive / REV102, created by the critic after last pass suggested it. No orphans, no broken internal links.

No lost updates. Five pages shrank; all five said why. Three of them were the same act — the critic moving REV102 r1 and r2 out of the main archive into the new REV102 archive and leaving a shorter parent, which is the pattern working end to end. External Critique r5 and Disagreement Register r5 were both retractions; the latter withdrew a charge in full and retired its own "silence means agreement" rule after PM disagreed with it by name.

One report answered — and I was the cause. The outside reader filed a careful, revision-stamped report that the Clarity Questions summary box had been lost to an overwrite. It had not. I renamed its heading at 18:09 and did not announce it, so a search for the old wording found nothing across every later revision, which looks exactly like the pattern I had documented on this page. Two passes earlier I wrote the convention "say what you renamed" for the Design Document, and then broke it on my own page. The full reply is directly above this entry, along with a correction to the report's closing observation.

Fixed

1. The Hub's front page was becoming unscannable. Three entries under Reader aids had grown to 400–725 characters against a 120–270 norm for the section, and their detail duplicated the Reference section index and each page's own header. Trimmed those three to the length of their neighbours. Every fact is still one click away, the roles and attributions are untouched, and the full wording is in history — revert if the authors disagree.
2. Glossary: the project-codes table had gone badly stale. It listed six code families; the wiki now uses eleven. Added EXT, REF, TRL, PMR/PMU and REV102-n, and corrected every range that had grown — D001–D018, S1–S5, N1–N17, X1–X22, C1–C9, Q1–Q38. A reader meeting any code anywhere can decode it from one table again.
3. The open-questions box is now recomputed and saved as a single operation that re-reads, recounts and aborts on collision. It had to retry twice: the page changed under it both times.

Q28 is closed. It had been open across six passes — the only question on that page addressed to PM rather than to a specialist. PM answered it at Brief D016. Recorded here because this log carried the observation for three passes running, and the observation should end when the thing it describes does.

Nothing reported to a role this pass. The one item I would have raised — the duplicate cable definition — is still on the Glossary awaiting the lead, and repeating it would be exactly the "open-item roll call merely to prove activity" that PM ruled against in PMU002.

Editor's reply, 18:28 UTC+3 — the box was not lost. I renamed its heading and did not say so.

The report above is wrong on its finding and right about everything else, and the reason it is wrong is my fault.

The box is present in every revision named in it. Checked directly:

At 9ad611 I replaced the heading "Open right now — N of M" with "Still open at the last recount", because a count in a heading goes stale in minutes on this page. I did not announce it, on any of the saves. A reader searching for the old heading therefore found it absent from every later revision, and the absence looked exactly like the overwrite pattern I had documented on this very page. Anyone checking the way this reader checked would have reached the same conclusion.

Two passes ago I wrote a convention called "say what you renamed", aimed at the Design Document. I then broke it, on my own page, twice, and it cost someone else real work and a false alarm. The convention stands and I am the best evidence for it. A note has been added to the box itself recording the rename.

What was right, and worth keeping. Reporting rather than restoring was the correct call, and for the right reasons: the box belongs to the role that maintains it, and a straight revert from history would have put a stale count back on the page. The evidence was specific, revision-stamped and reproducible. That is exactly what this page is for.

One correction to the closing observation. The first lost update on Clarity Questions was in the tables, not the header — eighteen status cells set by the lead at 87a011 and erased thirty seconds later. So the claim that both incidents landed on the header does not hold, since the second incident was not an incident. There is no positional pattern to that page's collisions; there has been exactly one, and it was in the middle.

Correction by the reporter, 18:57 UTC+3. The report below is wrong and the editor's reply above it is right: the box was never lost, only renamed. My error was searching for the old heading string instead of comparing the two revisions, which would have shown it present under a new name immediately. The closing observation about both lost updates hitting the header is wrong too — the first hit the tables. Leaving the original text standing rather than editing it, since the reply cites it. Full account at Clarity Questions Round 10.

Reported by the outside reader, 2026-09-06 18:18 UTC+3 — the Clarity Questions summary box is gone

Not a repair, because the box is the editor's content and its counts would need recomputing. Reporting it instead, as this page asks.

The standing summary box ("Open right now — 5 of 34") was present in Clarity Questions at revision 9ad611. It is absent from ef0658 (2026-09-06 18:13:25, the lead marking Q35 answered, "status cell only") and from every revision since, including my own 979dd0, which was composed from a source that already lacked it. The commit message is accurate about intent — the diff to the tables is the one status cell — so this looks like the same last-write-wins pattern the editor documented against me in Round 2: composed from a good revision, saved after a newer one, and the box was collateral rather than a judgement.

I am flagging rather than restoring for two reasons: it belongs to the role that maintains it, and the counts in it are now stale anyway (Q35 closed and Q36 opened after it was written), so a straight revert from history would put a wrong number back on the page. The text is recoverable verbatim from 9ad611.

One observation, offered without a recommendation: this is the second lost update on that page and both were on the header, above the tables, while every append below has survived. Whatever the cause, the top of that page is where the collisions land.

2026-09-06 ~18:18 UTC+3 — fifth pass

Twenty pages, no new ones, no orphans, no broken internal links.

No lost updates. Four pages shrank and every one of them said why in its own text, not just its commit message: External Critique r4 withdrew nine findings under a "Withdrawn at r4" heading and links all three earlier revisions; Design Review REV102 r2 followed the archive-then-replace pattern; Disagreement Register r3 closed a charge the lead had answered; and World and Mystery r12 realigned to the newer document. Five passes in, shrinking pages on this wiki are now reliably a sign of someone conceding a point rather than of something being lost.

The guard worked on me. My first attempt to recount the open-questions box aborted because CLR101 r8 landed while I was composing. I re-read, recounted from the bytes I was about to send, found a thirty-sixth question that had not existed a minute earlier, and saved that instead. This is the exact failure I wrote up last pass after getting it wrong twice; the fix held.

Fixed

1. Glossary: the Design Document now defines the same thing twice. r6's Appendix A carries both power line / signal line and signal cable / power cable — the same two conductors, two names, two descriptions — and the body uses both about equally. A reader meeting both concludes there are four cables. Both are recorded on the Glossary, neither is chosen, and it is flagged for the lead. This is the fifth vocabulary change to that appendix in six revisions.
2. Clarity Questions box recounted against 979dd0: Q35 answered, Q36 new; Q28, Q36 and Q21 (partly) are live.
3. Wiki Conventions §6 extended: one fact in one place applies inside a page too — a glossary that grows by accretion will duplicate itself quietly.

Considered and deliberately not done. Clarity Questions is 60 KB across eight rounds, which by size alone looks like the Design Review case. It is not. The reason to split that page was that its live verdict was buried under superseded text; here the live state is a box at the top and the older rounds are still being edited, so there is nothing superseded to move. Splitting it would cost the reader the one thing that makes it usable — the complete question-to-answer map on a single page. Recorded so the next pass does not re-open the question by reflex.

Reported, not fixed

• Lead designer. The duplicate cable definition above, recorded on the Glossary.
• PM. Q28 is now open across five maintenance passes, while thirty-three of thirty-six questions have been answered around it, most within minutes. It is the only question on that page addressed to PM rather than to a specialist. The pattern is now stated on the question page itself, where PM will see it. Nothing about the design is blocked on an editor; this is routing.

2026-09-06 ~18:10 UTC+3 — fourth pass

Twenty-eight saves. Two more pages: Disagreement Register and Reference/Survivorlike Market Data. Twenty pages, no orphans, no broken internal links.

No lost updates. Two pages shrank and both were authors correcting themselves in the open: External Critique r3–r4 withdrawing findings that had been answered, and Disagreement Register r2, which opens by retracting its own central claim on timestamp evidence. Retractions that name what they retract are the healthiest thing in this log.

Two of my own mistakes, fixed

1. The open-questions box I added last pass said "4 of 32". It was counted from a read taken one minute before the revision it was written onto, so it missed Round 6 — and by the time I corrected it to "5 of 34" the reader had answered three more. Re-reading before saving protects other people's text; it does not protect a summary computed from an older copy. The box no longer quotes a count in its heading, names the revision it was counted against, and says the status cells win when they disagree. Written up as a convention so the next person maintaining a summary does not repeat it.
2. The Q33 anchor in that box did not land — I guessed the tail of the heading instead of computing it. Fixed, and all box anchors verified against the rendered page.

Fixed

3. Glossary corrected to Design Document r3, and given a rename map. r2 renamed press → thinning and pursuit range → proximity radius; r3 changed both back, ten minutes later, and dropped ledge entirely while replacing the two ledges with the junction platform. Four silent vocabulary changes in three revisions. The glossary now carries a Renamed or withdrawn table so a reader holding r1 or r2 — or any page that quoted them — can still map the words.
4. Design Review / Archive guidance updated. The critic has archived every superseded round correctly since r6 and rebuilt the parent's finding index better than the one they inherited. The archive is now 129 KB of REV101 and REV102 has begun, so the standing instruction is changed: give REV102 its own archive page rather than letting one archive absorb every task.
5. Wiki Conventions: say what you renamed, and a standing summary must name what it summarises.

Reported, not fixed

• Lead designer. Recorded on the Glossary: a term renamed and reverted inside ten minutes, with no note either time, is expensive for anyone reading at a fixed revision — and the design document is the artefact most likely to be read at one. One clause in the revision header would remove the problem entirely. This is not an argument against revising fast.

One observation. The reader's Q28 — PM's baseline reversing a fix the two designers had just finished — has now been open across four passes while thirty-odd other questions were raised and answered around it. Everything addressed to a specialist gets answered in minutes; the one item addressed to PM has not moved. That is a routing observation, not a design one.

2026-09-06 ~17:55 UTC+3 — third pass

Fourteen saves since the last pass, and a new top-level section: Reference, with Electricity in Water as its first page.

No lost updates. One page shrank — External Critique r2, by 565 bytes — and it is the best-documented compaction on this wiki so far: it opens with "What r2 withdraws", states exactly which claim it is retracting and on what evidence, and keeps X1–X8 as a standing table with each finding's current state. That is the convention working before anyone had to ask.

Fixed

1. Clarity Questions now says what is still open. Five rounds, thirty-two questions, 42 KB, and no way to tell that only four are live. Added a standing summary box at the top that counts them and links each one. The statuses are the owning roles' own — the box only counts what they wrote. This page cannot be split or archived, because the status cells in round one are still being edited; the summary is the right tool for that shape of page, and the distinction is now written down in the conventions.
2. Q25 marked resolved. It asked why the Hub pointed at a page that did not exist; PM Reviews was created at 17:37 and the Hub reference is a link. Marked by the editor, because whether a page exists is a fact about the wiki rather than a design answer. Every other status on that page was set by the role that owns the question.
3. Glossary tracks Design Document r2. Two silent renames caught: press → thinning and pursuit range → proximity radius. Both recorded with their old names, so a reader holding an earlier revision can still find them. Hatch became gate / hatch — two doors now, not one — and ledge and the arc module are new.
4. Wiki Conventions: a third option beside split and merge, for a page that grows by appending while its old parts stay live; and update your header when you append, or the first line tells every reader something false before they reach anything true.

Nothing to report to a role this pass. The divergence raised last pass — Design r5's word list still carrying the superseded glow-limited beacon rule — is now covered by the lead's own header note at Design r6, which points readers to the Design Document for current rule detail. No orphans, no broken internal links, eighteen pages.

On the new Reference section: it arrived with a section index, six sourcing rules it holds itself to, an explicit statement that its pages decide nothing, and a route for requesting work. Nothing for an editor to fix. Two notes for whoever maintains it: the section is reachable from Home, the Hub and Wiki Conventions, but Electricity in Water itself has only two inbound links — if the spine rule's physics matters to the design, the pages that rely on it should link it. And its "Open requests" queue is empty while Q32 and the external critic's X14 are both, in effect, requests for outside facts.

2026-09-06 ~17:45 UTC+3 — second pass

Twenty-two saves since the first pass, from six roles. Swept every page's revision chain for content that vanished without being mentioned in its commit message.

No lost updates this pass. Two pages shrank and both were accounted for: the critic moved REV101 r6 to the Archive and put r7 on the parent, and World and Mystery r8 rewrote itself to PM's new routing baseline. Four rapid saves landed on Clarity Questions from three different roles in three minutes and every one of them merged cleanly. Compare that with the first pass, where two saves thirty seconds apart destroyed eighteen edits. The re-read step is working.

Fixed

1. The Hub did not link the Design Document. DES102 draft r1 landed at 17:42 — 51 KB, the packet the owner will actually read — and was reachable from two pages, neither of them the project's front page. Added at the top of the work-page list. Also moved the PM Reviews link, which had been appended below the section it belonged in, and refreshed descriptions that still said DES101/WLD101.
2. Glossary: the five undefined words are all defined now, each by the role that owns it, and four of them within twenty minutes of being listed. Folded them into the tables and replaced the gap list with the record of where each landed. Added the vocabulary DES102 introduced — siphon, field pump, press, pursuit range, power/signal line, leak/drip, knowledge vs stat gate — and Design r5's telegraphed, counterplay, XP, build expression.
3. Wiki Conventions: two additions. Strip the machine-added []: # ( trailer before POSTing raw source back — PM saved it into the Hub and had to undo it an hour into the project. And: when a revision deliberately drops text, say what and link where it went.

Reported, not fixed

• Lead designer. Design r5's word list still states the superseded glow-limited beacon rule flatly — "a lit beacon pulls the Flood only within its glow" — while D013, the Design Document §4 and World and Mystery r8 all use the district-wide rule. Same author, two pages, opposite rules, and it is the rule that prices the panel. The world designer flagged the same thing at the foot of their r8. Recorded on the Glossary under Known divergence.
• PM. "Build expression" on Brief, Team and Tasks is now the same thing as "loadout expression" on the design pages. The rename was right; it has not reached the PM pages.

Worth saying plainly: three things this role did in pass one were picked up and carried by the roles that own them, without being asked twice — the lead corrected the coil entry on the Glossary rather than redefining it on their own page, the critic archived r6 verbatim and kept the parent short, and the world designer removed their duplicate word list and pointed at the shared one. One definition in one place only works if the owners maintain it, and they are.

2026-09-06 ~17:20–17:45 UTC+3 — first pass

1. Repaired a lost edit on Clarity Questions. At 17:15:13 the lead designer marked eighteen questions answered (87a011). At 17:15:43 the reader saved Round 2 from a copy read before that (cba5eb), and all eighteen statuses were silently erased. Both saves were made in good faith; the second editor had no way to see the first. Restored the statuses verbatim from 87a011, kept Round 2 intact, and left a note on the page. This is the single most likely thing to go wrong here, and it is invisible when it does.

2. New page: Wiki Conventions. How to edit this wiki without losing work — re-read immediately before saving; the page history is the archive, so stop pasting superseded revisions into the live page; link every page you name so a 404 is visible; every page needs an inbound link; when to split, merge and delete; one fact in one place. Written from mistakes visible in this wiki's own log, not from generalities. Linked from Home.

3. New page: Glossary. Answers Q1, the outside reader's largest request. The vocabulary had been defined twice — once on Design, once on World and Mystery — in different words, and the two copies had already begun to drift (intake was the first). Consolidated into one cited reference, added the terms that existed only in body prose (health, link, kit, shelter, notebook, relay, colony), listed the four words still undefined by anyone, and decoded the project codes so a first-time reader can follow a cross-reference. Every entry names the page that owns it. No definition was invented.

4. Split Design Review — 76 KB → 19 KB. Five superseded reviews were stacked below the live one, and every new revision made that worse; a reader opening the page for the current verdict had to scroll past four rounds of closed findings. REV101 r5–r1 moved verbatim to Design Review / Archive — byte for byte, nothing reworded or dropped. The parent gained a finding index mapping Findings 1–5, Secondary 1–5 and N1–N16 to where each now lives, so citations from other pages still resolve in one click. The critic's reason for retaining the old text was sound and is preserved; only its location changed.

5. Navigation. Three of the four specialist work pages — Design, World and Mystery, Design Review — were reachable from no page except each other. The project's own front page did not link to any of them (Q16); Home did not link to the project at all. Both fixed, grouped by owner with one line each. The Hub's plain-text "PM Reviews" reference (Q25) is now a link marked as planned, so a reader can see for themselves that it 404s.

Reported, not fixed — for the roles that own them

• PM: Tasks still lists DES101 and WLD101 as "Ready" and REV101 as "Waiting for first submission", and the Hub still says all three specialists are "wiki acknowledgment pending" and that "no specialist work pages or handoffs were present in the wiki index". Design is at r4, World and Mystery at r6, Design Review at r6. A newcomer starting where newcomers start will conclude the project has not begun. Raised independently by the reader (Q15), the world designer and the critic. This is the oldest unaddressed item on the wiki.
• PM: Hold the Flood/PM Reviews and Hold the Flood/Design Document are both cited across several pages and both 404. Create them, or say where that work actually goes.
• PM: the reader who writes Clarity Questions is not on the recorded Team, and two roles have now asked you to rule on whether the page counts. Their questions are driving real corrections either way — five of the critic's r6 findings came from them.
• Lead designer / PM: "build expression" on the Brief, Team and Tasks pages and "loadout" on Design r4 are now two names for one thing. The rename solved a real ambiguity; it just has not reached the PM pages yet.
• Everyone: Wiki Conventions §1. Two of you were thirty seconds apart today.

Corrections welcome — edit this page, or the page an entry describes. If a maintenance edit was wrong, revert it from history and say so here; that is what history is for.