Collection prototypes

Type: kb/types/note.md

A collection prototype is optional creation-time text for a new COLLECTION.md. It supplies a worked starting contract that a project may copy and adapt instead of drafting every clause from scratch.

Copying ends the relationship. The destination project's COLLECTION.md is the only binding contract for its collection, and that project owns and maintains it. Commonplace does not synchronize the copy, apply later prototype changes to it, or treat the collection as conforming to the prototype. A prototype update therefore affects only future copies.

This differs from a text contract, which is the current, binding declaration in a collection's own COLLECTION.md. Writing, connection, conformance review, and validation consume the local contract; they do not resolve a prototype or inherit rules from this catalogue.

Shipped prototypes

commonplace-init uses three prototypes when it creates a project's standard collections. Their source files are package data under src/commonplace/_data/templates/:

Prototype Source file Starting purpose
Notes user-notes-COLLECTION.md Claims, mechanisms, definitions, and synthesis used to reason about the project's domain
Reference user-reference-COLLECTION.md Faithful, economical accounts of the system the project ships
Instructions user-instructions-COLLECTION.md Executable procedures, skills, and operational rules

Each installed contract tells the maintainer to replace its placeholders and state the collection's own purpose, scope, quality goal, conventions, link rules, and type eligibility. Existing destination files are preserved rather than refreshed from the prototype.

Experimental prototypes

Dialectical / evidential

user-dialectical-evidential-COLLECTION.md is an opt-in prototype for a collection that maps a live, sourced disagreement without adjudicating it. It requires every substantive proposition to name an asserter and carry a source-span citation with a prose locator and grounding marker. Its quality goal is faithful representation of the state of contestation.

The file carries an experimental collection prototype banner. One worked case established that the contract is usable, but independently maintained collections have not tested it. commonplace-init does not install it automatically. A maintainer who deliberately copies it must replace its paths, link rules, and type-eligibility placeholder, then owns the resulting contract without any continuing prototype relationship.

What is not a prototype

kb/articles/COLLECTION.md is a complete local editorial contract, not a shared prototype. It has one realization and no present creation-time consumer. Keeping its conventions local avoids advertising reuse that the framework neither supplies nor maintains. A future reusable article starting contract should be added only when a concrete collection-creation need exists.

Ordinary collection contracts also need not begin from a prototype. A maintainer may write a complete local contract directly whenever none of the available starting points fits.

Relevant Notes: