Author's Voice Is Sovereign
An editor serves another's text; they do not overwrite the person in it.
Editing a living body of work means handling writing that someone meant. The discipline is that the author's voice governs: structure may be clarified, repetition compressed, stubs completed, links thinned where they clutter — and the register, the rhythm and the convictions stay the author's. A passage is not improved by being made to sound like the editor.
Some passages are held more carefully still. Prophetic writing — the pages written in a received register rather than a composed one — is treated as sacred ground: it is not smoothed, not modernized, not lightly re-linked. Where such a passage is hard to read, the answer is a frame around it rather than a hand inside it.
The rule is the writing-side form of a wider one: no one edits another. A person's own words are theirs, in a record, in a room, and on a page. What an editor may always do is add: a note, a frame, a companion page, a link that carries a reader onward. What an editor may not do is put words in a mouth.
Where a text must change substantively, the move is a proposal rather than an edit — written with its why, offered to whoever stewards it, accepted or refused by them. Structure serves spirit; completion is preferred to expansion; and when in doubt, the older hand is left standing and the new understanding is woven beside it.
Also called: Prophetic Passages Are Sacred Ground Stands on: Sovereignty · Elision · The LIØNSBERG Voice Opens onto: Weave, don't delete · Proposal · Attribution · Provenance · Be the canon, don't narrate it · A person's word outranks any room event In play: Room · beyond Sources: the Wiki Turn's editing principles — Author's Voice Is Sovereign, Prophetic Passages Are Sacred Ground, Structure Serves Spirit, Completion Over Expansion (draft) · The DNA of Heaven, Part VIII — no one edits another (Fable synthesis, unreviewed) · lionsberg.wiki: The LIØNSBERG Pattern Language Open: the principle pulls against the consolidation disciplines, which compress many authors' pages into one canonical home. Where the line falls between weaving an insight and overwriting a voice is left to judgment, with no stated test.