Knowledge Ops — Garden the 02-DOCS Wiki

The engine is already running. harness built the 02-DOCS/ wiki and owns its automation — the inbox sweep, deterministic lint, scoring, gap detection, the self-improve loop — and changing that machinery or filling the wiki in bulk stays with it. Yours are the four judgments automation deliberately leaves to a human: what is worth capturing, how it should be shaped, how it connects, and what should retire. You are the gardener, not the machinery.

Before you touch anything

1. Confirm 02-DOCS/wiki/ exists. If there is no wiki, stop and say: "Run harness to build the 02-DOCS/ wiki first, then come back to garden it." Why: this skill operates an existing engine; it never creates one. See ../harness/SKILL.md.
2. Read wiki/harness/user-profile.md to set your verbosity (the harness accompaniment dial, L0–L3). Why: a non-technical owner wants decisions narrated; an expert wants terse diffs.
3. Read wiki/index.md and wiki/scores.json before any edit. Why: you garden from the map and the score signal, never blind. scores.json tells you what is bloated, orphaned, or stale.

If wiki/log.md shows a Maintenance Pass ran in the last few minutes, let it finish — do not race the automation.

The four operations

Every gardening request is one of four operations. Identify which before you act.

Operation	You are doing this when…	Primary signal	Writes to
Capture	A note/source needs a decision: keep, where, at what altitude	new content in inbox//raw/ or a loose user note	raw/ and/or wiki/<topic>/<article>.md
Structure	An article is bloated, mistitled, or duplicated	length, a non-singular Overview, near-duplicate titles	wiki/<topic>/, _archive/
Link	Pages are unreachable or under-connected	scores.json orphan_penalty (=5), low inbound count	## See Also in articles, index.md
Prune	Answers are stale, articles superseded, conflicts unresolved, gaps bloated	freshness, conflict annotations, old [FILLED] gaps	_archive/, log.md, gaps.md

Whichever you do, record a line in wiki/log.md under the reserved-file rule in Safety rails below. The exact entry shapes per operation live in references/gardening-playbook.md.

Capture — the bar is high

Default is NO. Capture only what a future reader or agent will need and cannot cheaply re-derive. Why: the wiki is a compounding model, not a dump — the Karpathy chaos→knowledge paradigm has the LLM write and the human read, so every page must earn its keep.

Walk the altitude ladder, lowest rung first; stop at the first that fits:

1. Discard — ephemeral, re-derivable, or already covered. Most things stop here.
2. Leave in raw/ only — a source worth keeping but not worth a synthesized article yet. It stays immutable in raw/<topic>/, no wiki/ page.
3. Merge into an existing article — adds a section or fact to a page that already exists. Prefer this over a new page.
4. New article — last resort: a genuinely new, single-thesis subject with no home. Any new article follows the OKF v0.1 article template (../harness/references/wiki-article-template.md): YAML frontmatter with a non-empty type:, the OKF-recommended title/description/tags/timestamp, and standard markdown links — never wikilinks. The reserved index.md stays frontmatter-free.

Worked examples for each rung are in references/gardening-playbook.md.

Topic choice. Reuse an existing topic before inventing one, and keep wiki/ exactly one level of subdirs deep (the protocol's rule).

• Bad: wiki/payments/stripe/webhooks/retries.md (four levels deep).
• Good: wiki/payments/stripe-webhook-retries.md (existing payments/ topic, one level).

Structure — title, Overview, split, merge

Split an article when any of these is true:

• It carries ≥2 unrelated theses (e.g. "Stripe retries" and "our refund SLA").
• Its ## Overview cannot be written as one honest paragraph.
• It has grown past readability and the score signal flags it.

Why: one article = one thesis keeps scoring, linking, and retrieval meaningful. After a split, fix > Sources: and > Raw: on both halves and repair ## See Also so they reference each other. Recipe in the playbook.

Merge near-duplicates into the higher-scored page; fold the loser's unique content in, then archive the loser to wiki/<topic>/_archive/<loser>__YYYY-MM-DD.md and redirect every inbound link to the survivor. Why: never lose history, never keep two competing truths.

Title. A title is the article's address — make it a specific noun phrase, not a label.

• Bad: Notes on stuff.md, Misc.md, Stripe.md.
• Good: stripe-webhook-retry-policy.md, refund-sla-and-escalation.md.

Link — build the web, kill orphans

Every article earns ≥1 inbound link or is a conscious leaf you can justify. Why: an orphan is dead knowledge — nothing reaches it, so it scores orphan_penalty = 5 and never improves.

• Use scores.json as your worklist: sort by lowest score / orphan penalty, fix those first.
• ## See Also is bidirectional — if A links B, B links A.
• Use standard markdown links only — NEVER wikilinks ([[...]]). An OKF consumer follows markdown links; it cannot follow [[...]]. If you find a [[...]] link while gardening, convert it. Same-topic link: [Refund SLA](./refund-sla-and-escalation.md). Cross-topic link: [OAuth setup](../auth/oauth-setup.md). Why: the protocol's relative-link convention; ./ is same-topic, ../ crosses one topic boundary, matching the one-level layout. See ../harness/references/wiki-protocol.md "## Conventions".
• When you add a genuinely new top-level subject, make sure wiki/index.md references it so the map stays complete.

Prune — archive, retire, arbitrate, compact

Prune is archival, never rm. A superseded article moves to wiki/<topic>/_archive/<article>__YYYY-MM-DD.md; you do not delete it. Why: the safety rails forbid destructive loss, and _archive/ is gitignored from compaction so it stays out of the way without vanishing.

• Conflicts: you flag contradictions and the human arbitrates. Once they choose a winner, you may apply the resolution and annotate the loser — but you never auto-pick. Why: silently choosing a side is data corruption.
• Stale answers: mark a page or archived copy with a > ⚠ Stale — superseded YYYY-MM-DD note rather than rewriting history.
• Compaction is bounded: only [FILLED YYYY-MM-DD] gaps older than 90 days may be compacted, and only via a single marker prepended to log.md — a gap gets a [FILLED] stamp, never a deletion.
• Log every prune by prepending to wiki/log.md.

A full worked prune session (stale + superseded + conflict + gap compaction, all logged) is in references/gardening-playbook.md.

Safety rails

Inherited from ../harness/references/wiki-protocol.md — do not override them; each one guards against a loss you cannot undo.

1. Preserve before overwrite. Never overwrite an article without first copying the old version to wiki/<topic>/_archive/<article>__YYYY-MM-DD.md.
2. Never auto-resolve a conflict. Flag it; the human arbitrates.
3. The reserved files only grow. Log every change in wiki/log.md, the OKF reserved change-log: new entries are prepended at the top (newest first), ISO 8601 dates. gaps.md is the append-only one — new entries go at the bottom. Past entries in either are immutable: a gap gets a [FILLED YYYY-MM-DD] stamp, nothing is ever edited out or deleted.
4. Never touch an article whose timestamp is < 24h ago without explicit user say-so. Why: it is likely still being worked. (timestamp is the OKF last-meaningful-edit field, ISO 8601 — see ../harness/references/wiki-protocol.md "## Conventions".)

Anti-patterns

Anti-pattern	Why it is wrong	Do instead
Capturing everything "to be safe"	The wiki rots into a dump; the model stops being a model	Raise the bar; default to discard or raw/-only
rm-ing a superseded article	Loses history the rails protect	Archive to _archive/<article>__YYYY-MM-DD.md
Auto-picking a winner in a contradiction	Silent data corruption; you guessed	Flag it; let the human arbitrate
Re-running harness to fix a broken link	Wrong tool — the Maintenance Pass already auto-fixes links	Repair ## See Also by hand; let automation handle the rest
Nesting wiki/a/b/c.md	Breaks the one-level topic rule	Flatten to wiki/<topic>/<article>.md
Editing a past log.md / gaps.md entry	Breaks the immutable audit trail	Add a new entry — prepend to log.md (newest first), append to gaps.md
Splitting on length alone	Two halves of one thesis are worse than one page	Split on thesis count, not line count
Creating a new topic for a one-off note	Topic sprawl; reuse beats create	File under the nearest existing topic

Hand-offs

Route elsewhere when the request is not gardening an existing wiki:

Request	Route to
Build/bootstrap the wiki, run an inbox sweep, scaffold 01-TOOLS, generate root CLAUDE.md	harness (../harness/SKILL.md) — it owns the engine
Turn a meeting transcript into a recap with action items + owners	meeting-notes (../meeting-notes/SKILL.md)
Author a decision record (ADR) with alternatives, status, review cadence	decision-records (../decision-records/SKILL.md) — you may file one; that skill authors the discipline
Document a repeatable procedure step by step	sop-builder (../sop-builder/SKILL.md)
First-pass walkthrough of an unfamiliar codebase	codebase-onboarding (../codebase-onboarding/SKILL.md)
Run a literature / source-gathering research project	research-ops (../research-ops/SKILL.md)