Ore (mined before deletion)

Before a page goes, it is mined: what still carries meaning is set down with its date, its source page, and where it went or could go.

The practice is three sentences long and it is one of the most useful things a body can do with its own past. Read the page that is about to leave. Take out the lines that still land — the sentence that says something better than anything that replaced it, the image nobody has used since, the one-line statement of a mission. Write them down together with the date, the page they came from, and where each might now belong. Then let the page go; the version history keeps every byte, and the record of decisions keeps the why (The four fates, Weave, don't delete, Provenance).

It is load-bearing because most pages that need to go still contain something that does not. The usual choices are both bad: keep the whole page, and the living body fills with things nobody reads; delete it, and the good lines go with it and are never recovered, because nobody ever browses a version history for a sentence they do not know exists (Prune, Compost, The Living Library).

What makes it work is that the ore is addressed. It is not a scrap pile. Each piece is set down beside a note saying where it should go — this line for the opening of that book, this image for the door, this sentence for the page that will be written later. Mined ore that nobody routed is simply a second place where good lines go to be forgotten (Curation, Linking (as curation), Submittals).

It also leaves an honest record of the left behind: the headers that held nothing, the pointers to things that still stand elsewhere. Saying what was not worth carrying is part of the same honesty as saying what was (Transparency, Decision Records, Every Defect Is A Gift).

Also called: mining a page · the ore Stands on: Weave, don't delete · The four fates · Provenance Opens onto: Curation · Prune · Migration · Decision Records · The Living Library · Compost · One canonical home per concept · Change log In play: Home — done once, by whoever is retiring the page Sources: Archive/Archive — Ore Mined Before Deletion.md (draft; the practice is recorded there together with the first ore mined under it) · Archive/Archive.md, the four-step discipline (draft) · lionsberg.wiki: Weave, Don't Delete Open: Nothing states who reads the ore afterwards, or what happens to a mined line that is never routed anywhere; the first page of ore is also, so far, the only one.