/method/reverse-wiki
Reverse wiki
The thesis
A wiki made knowledge editable and linkable. Anyone could change a page, and any page could point at any other; moderation was bolted on after the open write. A reverse wiki inverts that write model. The reader does not edit the page in place. The page is the public projection of a governed record that was admitted upstream, rendered under a profile overlay, and left readable and traversable by people and by agents through a constrained surface, never written through the page itself.
Stated compactly: a wiki makes knowledge editable and linkable; a reverse wiki makes knowledge admissible, projectable, and agent-operable. This is a claim about where authority lives, not a claim about the interface. In a wiki, authority lives in the edit box and is reconciled by moderation afterward. In a reverse wiki, authority lives in the admission gate and the renderer authority list, and the page is downstream of both.
GARPedia is a reference read surface for that inversion. It renders page models drawn from an admitted pool, and it has no path from the page back into the record.
Editable and linkable, versus admissible, projectable, and agent-operable
The two old wiki affordances each have a reverse-wiki successor, and the successor is a different object with a different owner, not the same object with review added on top.
- editablebecomes admissible. Write authority moves off the page and into an admission gate. A reader can propose; only the gate writes. Correction is append-and-supersede against immutable records, not in-place mutation of a live page.
- linkablebecomes projectable. The admitted record is the source of truth, and the page is a projection of it rather than a store. Cross-references resolve only within the admitted pool, so a reference cannot point at material that was never admitted.
- agent-operablemeans agents read and traverse the public projection. It does not mean an agent can write, mutate, or admit a record. There is no page-to-record path on this surface, and naming the projection agent-operable creates none.
Custody owner, render owner, operator owner
A reverse-wiki function is three accountable surfaces, not one. Naming all three is what turns a demonstration into a product; a function missing any of the three is a demo, not a product, and is not treated as one here.
- custody ownerowns the record and its admission. It answers whether the material is fit to exist in the pool at all, and owns provenance, redaction profile, supersession, and the immutability discipline. Refusal is a recorded outcome, not an error.
- render ownerowns the projection. It answers what the public sees given an admitted record, and what that render does not imply. It owns the page model, the renderer authority list, profile overlays, and every overclaim boundary. The render owner can hold material out of rendering even when it is admitted.
- operator ownerowns the moderation and continuation loop. It answers who reviews, promotes, disputes, or continues the knowledge, and through what governed action. The operator owner never edits a record; it acts through governed-write actions that re-enter custody.
The three are deliberately separable so that no single surface is a single point of failure for public safety. Admitted, rendered, and continued are three populations, and a function is product only when one named owner answers for each.
Where this already lives in GARPedia
The grammar is not aspirational; it has a concrete home in this repository. The custody plane is the admitted pool under public/garpedia/admitted/ with its index.json: admission adds files, supersession adds files and updates the manifest, and nothing under the pool is mutated in place. The render plane is the page model object, GarpediaRenderedRecord, together with listAdmittedPageModels(), which is the renderer authority: the explicit list of what is allowed to project. That list is the current renderer authority for this surface, and a record absent from it is not rendered, regardless of its admission state.
The CP-SIG renderer authority hold is this triad working correctly, not a defect. The CP-SIG records are admitted and public-safety scanned, so the custody owner has acted, but they are deliberately not renderer-authorized, so the render owner has not acted, and they await an explicit publication decision the operator owner has not made. This page is documentation prose; it does not lift, weaken, or revisit that hold, and it changes nothing in the renderer authority list.
Workbench as the moderation layer
The GARP Workbench is the operator owner's surface. It is the reverse-wiki successor to the wiki talk page and post-hoc moderation, with the order inverted: review and promotion happen before projection, not as cleanup after an open write.
The Workbench is not hosted in GARPedia and must not be. GARPedia is the public read surface and has no mutation surface; conflating the two would collapse the render owner and the operator owner into one place and reintroduce the wiki failure mode of authority living in the page. The Workbench never mutates an admitted record. It produces a new admission or supersession event that the custody owner records, and that the render owner may then project or continue to hold.
Counterpose as the publication and continuation layer
Counterpose is the publication and analytical-continuation surface, the reverse-wiki successor to informal talk-page consensus made into a governed, published object. It is both publication, where a position is stated and governed, and continuation, where disagreement and development are themselves published, governed continuations rather than ephemeral threads.
Counterpose owns its editorial publications. GARPedia consumes admitted Counterpose editorial as captured records; it does not author, approve, or verify them. This is why the CP-SIG material is held: real Counterpose editorial republished through this surface is an editorial act with a different overclaim profile from rendering synthetic demonstration fixtures, and the render owner holds it until the operator owner records an explicit publication decision. The hold the CP-SIG memo documents is exactly what the grammar predicts.
What this page does not claim
This is an explainer for a vocabulary, not a shipped capability. The following are explicitly not claimed and must not be inferred from it.
- No renderer behavior change. Nothing here authorizes, route-enumerates, or links any record. The renderer authority list is unchanged and the CP-SIG hold stands in full.
- No new public fixtures. No material is admitted to the admitted pool, and the manifest is unchanged.
- No private corpus. GARPedia renders synthetic demonstration data and admitted public artifacts only; no matter-specific or private material is introduced or implied.
- No substrate-spine implementation. GARPedia consumes the public projection of an upstream governed-knowledge substrate; it does not build or evaluate that substrate, and naming it states the origin of admitted material rather than a capability of this repository.
- No verification or receipt claim. Rendering an admitted record makes no issued, verified, or cryptographically validated claim. Captured editorial carries no receipt and does not borrow receipt visual authority.
- No agent write path. Agent-operable means an agent reads and traverses the projection. There is no agent write, mutation, or admission capability against any record.
- The triad is necessary, not yet sufficient. Naming a custody, render, and operator owner is the minimum bar to call a function product; it does not by itself discharge the controls each owner remains accountable for.