The four fates

What a page can meet when a body tends its own writing: kept · archived · discarded · synthesized.

Kept — it crosses whole into the living body of work, read in full and made coherent with what surrounds it. Archived — it has been superseded, and its provenance is preserved while it is unlinked from the living pages. Discarded — nothing of unique weight in it survives current best understanding; the version history remembers what the page cannot. Synthesized — it is folded into a page that says the same thing better, and its meaning continues under another name (Weave, don't delete, One canonical home per concept, Current Best Understanding).

Naming four is what makes the tending honest. With only keep and delete, everything becomes a verdict on whether a page was good — and so bodies hoard, because deleting feels like erasure and keeping feels safe. Four fates let the decision be about what serves a reader now, and let a page that was genuinely valuable still stop being carried (Prune, Drift, Compost).

Each fate leaves a mark. A crossed page names where it went and when; an archived page keeps its lineage; a discarded page lives on in history; a synthesized page points at the page that absorbed it. What is never acceptable is silent disappearance — a reader following a link into nothing learns nothing, while a mark tells them exactly what happened (Provenance, Change log, Decision Records).

And the crossing is done by a mind, never by a script. A page is read in full and made coherent with its neighbours; moving text mechanically is how a body acquires a library that looks tended and is not (Curation, Second reader, Semantic Capture).

Also called: kept · archived · discarded · synthesized Stands on: Weave, don't delete · Current Best Understanding · Curation Opens onto: Ore (mined before deletion) · Prune · Provenance · Migration · One canonical home per concept · The Living Library · Change log · Compost · Weaving vs. Starting New In play: Home — decided one page at a time, by whoever read it Sources: Projects/the term pages/Migrated.md (draft, unreviewed; the four fates are marked a proposal on the page) · Archive/Archive.md, the four-step discipline of verifying the destination, preserving provenance, moving rather than deleting, and updating inbound references (draft) · lionsberg.wiki: Weave, Don't Delete Open: A proposal in one draft page and nowhere adopted. · The page carrying it also carries a defect recorded as standing: its own sense of a page's crossing contradicts how a sibling campaign uses the same word.