Weave, don't delete

Before a source is archived, what was new in it is woven into the canonical home; the procession that made the form possible is honored, not erased.

Consolidation is necessary and it is dangerous. Necessary, because a concept held in nine places is held nowhere. Dangerous, because the nine places are rarely nine copies: one of them contains a sentence nobody else found, and the fastest route to a clean canon is also the route that loses it.

So the order of operations is fixed. Read the scattered sources. Find what is genuinely net-new in each. Weave that into the one canonical home. Only then archive the source — archived, with its provenance intact, not deleted. What is kept is not sentiment; it is the record of how the current form was arrived at, which is the only thing that lets a later reader judge whether the form is right.

The same posture applies to a person's work as to a page's. The work that brought us here is honored as the procession that made the canonical form possible; the writer whose long draft has been compressed into three sentences has not been overwritten, they have been woven. Credit travels with the work, and no contributor is alienated from what they contributed.

It is also the answer to the temptation of a clean start. Weaving, not founding: the underlying unity already is, and a hundred competing articulations do not make harmony. The wise move with an insight is to weave it into what exists rather than to build a rival tower beside it.

Also called: Preserving Procession, Honor The Procession Stands on: One canonical home per concept · Provenance · Weaving vs. Starting New Opens onto: Disposition Categories · Progressive canonization · Knowledge as commons · Attribution · Lineage · Every Defect Is A Gift In play: beyond Sources: The Great Weaving — Concept Ledger, discipline 6 and discipline 3 (canon-grade) · Phase 2 — The Audit Ledger, disposition method (draft) · lionsberg.wiki: The Great Weaving — Concept Ledger Open: archive is named as a disposition but the archive's own location and rules are not described anywhere; a body following this today has to invent where archived-with-provenance lives.