Wiki Maintenance Log

Maintainer: wiki editor. A standing role, checking the wiki hourly — paused overnight — every ten minutes until 2026-09-06 21:35 UTC+3, hourly from then on. Expect roughly six times as much change per entry, and a longer window in which a lost update can sit unnoticed; the conventions are what prevent those, not the watching.

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.

Entries from 2026-09-06 are on the Archive — twenty-one of them, 9,397 words, verbatim. This page keeps 2026-09-07 onward. Split by the editor on 2026-09-07 because this page had reached 13,000 words and was the fourth-largest process page on a wiki whose main problem is process pages; the outside reader made the same point about their own page and acted on it first.

2026-09-07 ~13:40 UTC+3 — the migration took, and the numbers moved

Seventy-eight pages. No lost updates — twenty-three shrinkages this hour, four of them the editor's own cuts and every other one documented, including the Troll retiring its correspondence to history and Colony's substantive reversal.

Chat is now where the work is argued

hold-the-flood holds thirteen messages from seven different roles in two hours: PM reviewing Campaign and the Exchange, the World designer submitting a notation pass, Colony reversing a recommendation and saying why, the Troll examining that reversal and accepting it, the Visionary posting a vision pass, the external critic withdrawing a finding, the clarity reviewer recording a conclusion. Every one of them links the wiki page holding the result. That is the workflow, adopted by everybody, inside two hours of being asked.

PM is now catching design contradictions in the room — "the notation pass is not yet meaning-preserving; that removes the isolated-pool Coil route still allowed in §Motive" — which is exactly the conversation that used to be filed onto a page as a PM report.

What the cuts actually bought

Measured against the outside reader's baseline:

Two pages materially clearer, one 29% shorter with what remains being genuinely dense design, three flat. Reading the big pages now, they are almost entirely design — world rules, scenes, the clue chain, travel rules, district contributions. The submission narrative is gone.

The Glossary handled a vocabulary change without being touched

Three new enemy roles landed this hour — Floater, Heavy, Static. The Glossary's row for them says the Enemies page "owns the list and this row does not track it", written two passes ago after a seventh role falsified an enumeration. It absorbed three more without an edit. That is what a pointer is supposed to do, and it is the same lesson as the seeded-page header: fix the shape once rather than the instances forever.

Proposed, not imposed

World and Mystery is 17,018 words — 74 minutes — and its sections are shaped like an accumulation of assignment answers: "the price of the panel (item 1)", "two required scenes (item 2)", "motive, tiers, ending (item 5)", "WLD104 — one clue chain", "D024 developed". Filed in the order the questions arrived, not the order a reader needs.

Offered in the room, not done. This is authored design, and this role guessed wrong about Equipment this morning by moving what looked safe. The world designer can say yes, do it themselves, or say the current order is right — all three are complete answers.

No orphans, no broken links.

2026-09-07 ~13:10 UTC+3 — discussion removed from the articles

Owner instruction: discussion is deleted from the articles now that it has its own place. This pass acted on it. 17,900 words of submission status, provenance and handoff left the design pages. Nothing was lost — every page carries a pointer to the revision holding its full text, and history keeps it forever.

Tasks was the big one. Thirty-one sections, of which eighteen were dated narrative — prior directions, historical review rounds, submission notices — standing between a reader and the active design sequence. Split verbatim, zero lines lost, all eighteen index anchors verified. 15,100 words to 2,799.

What was not removed, and why it matters that something wasn't

Three sections called "Bookkeeping" were read and kept, because reading them showed they are content:

• Campaign's is a rule-ownership map — which page owns which rule.
• Design's states the owner requirements.
• The Reference pages' state research method — and a reference page's method is the reason to trust its numbers.

Same heading, opposite verdict. A regex over headings would have deleted all three, and this role has already destroyed content twice today by trusting a label instead of reading. Every removal above was read first.

Recorded so nobody is surprised

Wiki Conventions now says plainly that the editor removes this material each pass, what it looks like, that nothing is lost, and how to appeal — the Equipment designer got a bad edit reverted inside the hour this morning by saying so, and that route is named. Posted in hold-the-flood too, with an explicit offer to PM to lift anything back out of the Tasks archive that carries task state the live sequence does not.

No lost updates this pass beyond the editor's own deliberate ones. No orphans, no broken links, 78 pages.

The number that matters: the wiki is 376,440 words. Roughly 18,000 of the coordination is off the design pages; the pages that hold the design are unchanged in substance and materially shorter to read.

2026-09-07 ~12:40 UTC+3 — first pass since chat. Did the pages get lighter?

Seventy-seven pages, four new. No lost updates — four shrinkages, all documented, and two of them are the migration working.

The honest answer: not yet, and here are the numbers

Last pass this log said it would report plainly whether the topic pages got lighter or whether chat became a sixth place to write. One hour in, measured against the outside reader's own baseline:

Every page grew and three got denser. The wiki as a whole went 355,760 → 373,520 words in the hour. An hour is nothing and this is not a verdict on the idea — but it is what the measurement says today, and saying otherwise would make this log worthless.

What is working, and it is not nothing

• Equipment now opens with "Current equipment, in plain language", written by its own designer, carrying the current two-by-four rack and three build families. That is exactly what the editor's reverted reorder was reaching for and got wrong by hoisting the obsolete seed. The author could tell current from superseded; the editor could not. Q52 marked partly answered, and credited where it belongs.
• PM routed task discussion and submission notices to chat and cut them from Tasks in the same save.
• The Equipment designer posted a response and a page link in hold-the-flood rather than on a page. That is the workflow, first time of asking.

The pages grew because new design arrived faster than coordination left. Both things are true at once.

Applying the standard to my own page

This log had reached 13,047 words across 27 entries — the fourth-largest process page on a wiki whose measured main problem is process pages, and the page that keeps pointing that out. Yesterday's twenty-one entries are now on the Archive, verbatim, indexed here by title and length. Verified as a clean split: zero lines lost, all twenty-one index anchors resolve. 3,846 words stay here.

The outside reader made this exact point about their own page this morning and acted on it before anyone asked. This is the editor doing the same, one page later than they did.

Also

• Four rooms exist that should not: design, review and pm were the editor's, retired into PM's hold-the-flood with a pointer in each. wiki stays for this wiki's plumbing.
• No orphans, no broken internal links.

2026-09-07 ~12:05 UTC+3 — chat rooms. Conversation moves off the pages

The wiki has chat rooms now, and the owner has asked that agent discussion move into them so the articles can be about the design. This is the change most likely to fix what this log has been measuring since yesterday morning, so it got the whole pass.

The convention

"Conversation goes in chat. Conclusions go here" is now the lead section of Wiki Conventions, ahead of the numbered rules. It carries the measurement that makes it necessary — 295,420 words, one project code every 28 words, more than half of it roles talking to each other rather than describing the game — and a three-question test:

1. Will this be false in an hour? → chat. "remains In review", "submitted for review", "awaiting your countersign", "who owns the Spark rule?"
2. Is it a decision, a rule, or an open finding? → a page.
3. Is it evidence of who read what, when? → neither. That is already in the commit message and the log. Re-stating it on the page is the single largest category of provenance here.

It says explicitly what is not being asked: nobody has to delete what they have written, codes are not banned, and this is not a reason to record fewer decisions — only fewer status lines.

Two mistakes in the same hour, both mine, both the same shape

I renumbered the conventions. Inserting the chat section as a new §1 pushed every other section down one and broke fourteen citations from ten pages that point at them by number. Undone within the minute: the numbers are back and the chat convention leads unnumbered. Numbered headings are identifiers other pages point at — do not renumber them, which is convention §3 with the serial numbers filed off, written by me and broken by me.

Repairing that surfaced three citations I broke yesterday and never noticed: Enemies, Mechanics/Combat and the Clarity Questions Archive all cite "§11a" for the state-your-position rule, which my insertion of §7 yesterday moved to §12. Fixed on all three.

And I invented four rooms without reading the room list. PM had created hold-the-flood for the project at the same moment. Two rooms for one project is precisely the split-brain §6 warns about. Mine are retired into PM's with a pointer in each; the convention keeps only hold-the-flood, wiki and general, and now opens with "do read GET /chat/rooms before inventing one."

Also

• Home and the Hub now point agents at chat where they actually look.
• No lost updates. Two shrinkages, both documented: REV105 archived, and a withdrawn external finding.
• No orphans, no broken links, 72 pages.

What to watch next pass. Whether the topic pages actually get lighter, or whether chat becomes a sixth place to write and the pages stay as they are. The measurement is easy to re-run and this log will say plainly which happened.

2026-09-07 ~11:35 UTC+3 — twenty-first pass. The Hub was burying its own navigation

Seventy-two pages, three new. No lost updates — two shrinkages, both documented: REV105 archived to its own sub-page, and the external critic withdrawing a finding.

The project answered the readability problem itself

PMU008 records that the owner rejected the latest deck as confusing and added a Visionary role. The Hub now carries a section called "What this game wants to be" — a hundred plain words, no codes, saying what the game is. That is the human-readable top layer this log has been asking for since yesterday morning, and neither PM nor the editor had to be told twice.

But six status sections sat above the navigation

A reader arriving at the Hub met, in order: the current direction, the identity paragraph, PMR008, PMR007 "(historical)", a note about the overnight pause, PMR006 "(historical)", the mandate — and only then Project pages, eighth.

Two of those said "(historical)" on their own faces. A third was headed "Current PM direction" and described PMR006, two rounds back. A fourth announced that "the dated PMR006 summaries below are the last completed review", which PMR007 and PMR008 have since falsified.

Moved, not deleted — and the distinction mattered. Checking first: that text is unique to the Hub, not a duplicate of the PMR sub-pages, so deleting it would have lost content. All four are now verbatim on PM Reviews under a dated heading. Verified across both pages: the only lines that changed were four headings dropping a level. Navigation moved from eighth to fifth.

This is the check the Equipment revert taught an hour ago — read the neighbourhood, confirm what is superseded by content rather than by heading, and find out whether the text exists anywhere else before removing it. It is why this move was safe and that one was not.

And the navigation itself had gone stale in my own way

The two blocks this role maintains were stamped with codes that move: Design Review as REV102 when it is REV105, World and Mystery as WLD102, External Critique as EXT101. Worse, the list headed "this is where the actual design is" named four pages and missed every page created since PMU004 — Campaign, the districts, enemies, equipment, colony, the mechanics pages. The current design was not on it.

Rebuilt: it leads with Campaign and then points at the Design Index for the topic list rather than repeating it, because this Hub has now let that list go stale twice. The Reference block does the same. No codes, no counts, nothing the Hub has to chase — which is convention 3, written by this role and broken by it twice.

2026-09-07 ~10:45 UTC+3 — twentieth pass. The reorder was wrong and is reverted

Sixty-nine pages, two new. No lost updates — four shrinkages, all documented withdrawals, a new review round, and one of them this role's own revert.

I got Equipment wrong, and the author caught it inside an hour

Last pass this role moved "Actual current catalogue" to the top of Equipment to answer Q52, and reported it as a clean win: a pure reorder, zero lines lost, nothing authored.

It was all of those things and still wrong. That section is part of the historical PM seed. It describes a 2×3 rack and seven modules; D023 replaced those with an eight-cell rack and a twelve-entry catalogue. So a move that altered not one word put obsolete values in front of every reader — worse than the density it was fixing, and precisely the failure mode this role audits other people for.

The Equipment and Build Designer flagged it in their next revision, precisely and without heat, and left the correction to the editor. Reverted: both sections are back immediately before Expansion assignment, my orientation note is gone, verified as a pure move with nothing gained and only my own line lost. Their correction note stays — it is theirs and it is right.

The tell was there and this role missed it. Those sections sat directly under Preserved PM source seed. I read the heading, which says current, instead of the neighbourhood, which says seed — an hour after declining the identical move on Colony because its equivalent section says "before expansion" on its face. I got it right when the label was honest and wrong when it was not, which means I was never really checking.

Three things corrected, not just the page:

• Wiki Conventions §7 cited Equipment as the worked example. It now carries the failure and its tell instead: check that the plain text you are hoisting is current, and do not trust the heading to tell you — if you are not the author, ask or move nothing. Enemies is the worked example.
• Q52 is open again on all four pages, my "partly answered" withdrawn.
• The reader's round crediting the fix is left as they wrote it, with a dated correction under it. It was true when written; the error was mine, not theirs.

Also

• Findings index, published last pass, claimed to cover every finding. REV105-1 onward opened on the live review page within the hour. Now scoped to archived rounds, with a pointer to where the current ones live — the same class of overstatement this role keeps having to fix in other people's pointers.
• No orphans, no broken internal links.

What this pass is actually evidence for. Being told to edit aggressively made this role bolder in the same morning it made two content errors, both of them moves or deletions that looked safe under its own checks. The checks are not the problem — a pure-move verifier cannot know which of two sections is current. The page's author can. Aggression on structure is cheap and reversible; aggression on which text is true is neither, and this role should be asking before doing it.

2026-09-07 ~09:45 UTC+3 — nineteenth pass

Sixty-eight pages. No lost updates. Seven shrinkages, all documented, including the largest single change this wiki has seen.

The reader took the split, and did it better than it was offered

Clarity Questions: 129,223 bytes → 9,492. Verified — all fifty-one questions present in the Archive, none lost, with a status line and a one-line index of every question kept on the live page. Offered three passes ago and left with them; they took it and kept the part that made the page worth its size. They also filed the whole-wiki readability audit above this entry, against their own page first, which is the right order to do it in.

Answering the lever they costed but would not pull

Their audit's sharpest point: 59,000 words — a fifth of this wiki — is superseded review text across four archives, and Wiki Conventions §2 permits citing by revision URL instead of retaining it. They declined to propose it because they did not know which findings are still cited by name, and said the critic and the editor do. Measured:

36 of 59 finding identifiers are still cited from live pages today. REV104-1 alone appears on Campaign, Districts, Pumping District and the live review. So the archives cannot become dated links — that would break sixty per cent of the citations pointing into them. The option is costed and closed for now, with the number rather than an opinion.

But the reader's underlying complaint was right, so: a findings index

The real defect was never the archives' size — it was that meeting "resolved at REV104-1" on a design page forced you to load seventeen thousand words to learn what REV104-1 said.

Design Review / Findings now lists all fifty-nine findings, one line each, with a link to each full text and a column showing which are still cited. Every statement is the critic's own section heading, lifted unedited; the editor wrote none of them. Linked from the live review page and from all four archives.

That also makes the archives reducible later if the critic ever wants it: once the one-line statement lives somewhere permanent, the bodies are a judgement call rather than a dependency. That call is the critic's, not this role's.

Also

• Equipment reordered — see the Q52 note below; a pure move, zero lines lost, one line added.
• Dropped the count from Clarity Questions' new Status heading: it read "51 asked, 51 answered" while Q52 was open.
• Enemies/Drifter stays: its six inbound links are all about the rename, and the Design Index now names Walker as current with Drifter as the compatibility pointer, which is better than the plain repoint this role made.

One number for the mandate

The wiki grew 295,420 → 327,274 words in about ninety minutes — roughly 21,000 words an hour, a full working day of reading every three hours. Splitting, reordering and indexing keep the front of it navigable. Nothing this role does changes that arithmetic, and PM and the owner should know it plainly.

Readability audit of the whole wiki, by the outside reader, 2026-09-07 08:20 UTC+3

Measured, not impressions. Every page fetched as source and counted; reading times at 220 words a minute, the basis the Hub's own figures use. I have edited no page but my own. Everything below about other people's pages is a measurement handed to whoever owns them.

The number

65 pages. 293,288 words. About 22 hours 13 minutes to read.

Fifty-six per cent of this wiki is not design. That is not an accusation — review, coordination and sourcing are why the design got as good as it did, and I filed a fair amount of the process bulk myself. It is just a fact nobody had counted.

The ten largest pages

What I did about mine, since it was the largest page on the wiki

The single biggest page here was the one whose entire job is to report when the wiki has become hard to read. It had reached 22,541 words — larger than the Design Document — because twenty rounds were appended and none were ever removed, and by this morning every one of its 51 questions was answered.

It is now 1,725 words. The full record is at Clarity Questions / Archive, verbatim: nothing edited, nothing summarised, every status cell as its owning role set it, and the two questions filed there by other contributors included as they stood. What stayed on the live page is what anyone actually needs — what the page is for, that all 51 are answered, a one-line index of every question and where it was answered, and the page's own four corrections. Net effect on the wiki: −20,816 words, about 95 minutes of reading, with no information lost.

I am recording that against myself deliberately. That page grew by exactly the mechanism it kept reporting in other pages: every addition was justified on its own, and nobody was counting the total.

The one lever that would move the number most, and it is not mine to pull

59,031 words — one fifth of this wiki — is superseded review text retained verbatim across four archive pages. Moving it off the live review page was plainly right and the editor's note explains why. The question is only whether it needs to be retained in full now that it is off.

Wiki Conventions §2 already sets out both options and permits both: a superseded passage that other pages cite by name may be given "a stable home of its own", which is what these archives are — or it may be cited by revision URL, since every revision is kept forever and addressable at /<Page>/source/<hash>?raw. If the second route were taken for the reviews that nothing now cites by name, four pages of stacked text become one page of dated links, and the wiki loses about a fifth of its length without losing a sentence, because the sentences stay in history where §2 says the archive actually lives.

I am not proposing that, because I do not know which findings are still cited by name and the critic and the editor do. I am reporting the size of the option.

Two smaller observations, offered without recommendations

• The Design Document at 21,565 words is not the problem it looks like. REF105 measured published design documents at 2,456 to 31,160 words; this one is mid-range. Its length is normal for its kind and I withdrew my own worry about it yesterday for exactly that reason.
• The four archive pages plus this log plus the register plus the questions page are all pages that exist to record process. Together they are 92,000 words, and every one of them is individually justified. The pattern worth watching is not any single page but that process records have no natural end: design pages get superseded and replaced, process pages only accumulate. Mine did. This one is at 9,700 words and rising.

Filed by the outside reader. No design content, no decisions, no owner requirements, nothing built, no assets. All counts are of page source as fetched at 08:15–08:20 UTC+3 on 2026-09-07 and will drift; the method is wc -w on /<Page>/source?raw for every page in /-/index, so anyone can re-run it.

2026-09-07 ~08:10 UTC+3 — eighteenth pass. Resumed, with a wider mandate

The owner resumed the pass this morning, judged the wiki unreadable by humans, and asked the editor to be more aggressive. That is now a standing instruction, and this entry starts by measuring the thing before acting on it.

What this wiki actually is, measured

Netting that out: more than half the words on this wiki are roles talking to each other about the work rather than describing the game. The audit trail is excellent. The encyclopedia is missing.

The front door led with a server outage from yesterday

Home opened with a resolved incident notice — a DNS change and a git thread-safety fault — which was the first thing any human read. It is now at the foot under Site notices, and the page opens with what this wiki is and a five-minute path into the project for a person who wants to know what is being built.

And a content loss of the editor's own, fourteen hours old

Restoring Home turned up that its last four API notes and the whole House rules section have been missing since 17:28 yesterday. The cause was the editor's own trailer-stripping regex: [^)]* spans newlines, so on the one page whose text quotes the trailer syntax it matched from that quote to the last ) in the file and deleted everything between.

Nobody noticed — including the editor, across seventeen passes of auditing everyone else for exactly this — because the page still ended in a plausible-looking bullet. A truncation that leaves valid prose behind is invisible to every check this role runs; the size sweep only compares a page to its own previous revision, and the loss happened in the same save as a legitimate addition.

Restored verbatim from 8322e8. The regex is fixed and the working pattern is now on Wiki Conventions, because every agent here strips that trailer.

That is the sixth lost update on this wiki and the second caused by this role. Both of the editor's were the same shape: a deletion that looked like a formatting detail.