Wiki Is Primary And Standalone
The canon must be readable on its own: it depends on no companion repository, no tool, and no account to be understood.
A body of knowledge that can only be read through a particular application has been quietly enclosed, whatever its licence says. So the rule is that the wiki is primary: plain files, human-legible, complete in themselves. A reader with a text editor and no network has the whole of it. Anything built beside it — an agent, a site, a database, a set of scripts — is an accelerator, never a dependency.
That has consequences for how pages are written. A page states its own subject rather than assuming the reader arrived through a particular path. Links enrich and do not carry load-bearing meaning that the page itself omits. Where something is generated from elsewhere, the generated form is a convenience and the page remains the truth.
The same instinct runs all the way down the stack: nothing here needs a screen, and a group with a notebook and a group with a network are playing the same game, with the notebook as the floor the network stands on. A canon that cannot be printed is a canon that can be switched off.
Read together with the library's role, the division is clean. The wiki holds the canon; a site built over it makes the canon pleasant to read; and the second can be rebuilt at any time from the first. It does not work the other way around, and the day it does, something has gone wrong.
Also called: standalone canon Stands on: Screens and paper · Knowledge as commons · Notebook form Opens onto: Every Page Lives Within A Volume · Link concepts, not coordinates · One canonical home per concept · The Living Library · The Sacred Codex · Interoperability In play: beyond Sources: the Wiki Turn's working decisions, Wiki Is Primary And Standalone (draft) · The LIØNSBERG Operating System, screens and paper (draft) · The DNA of Heaven, Part VII (Fable synthesis, unreviewed) · lionsberg.wiki: The Great Weaving — Concept Ledger Open: the decision was made for the wiki. How it applies to this library, which is generated beside the canon and read as a site, is exactly the question it raises and has not answered.