curation

Type: types/tag-readme.md

How the KB's indexes, tag heads, and body of notes stay usable as it grows: what a complete index can and cannot do, how to rank and prune notes, how to spot stale ones, and how periodic hygiene gets triggered. On the index side, the establishing notes are an enforced tag-README combines a MOC pattern with checked membership and indexes lower recall when they suppress retrieval that would find more. The audit procedure is maintain curated indexes. Whether an individual note's content is correct belongs to review-system and claims-and-grounding; curation is about the collection and its navigation. A child of kb-maintenance.

Indexes and tag heads

An enforced tag-README combines a MOC pattern with checked membership — a tag head keeps the map-of-content pattern while validation checks only declared membership
Indexes lower recall when they suppress retrieval that would find more — why a completeness claim must be enforced or omitted
Index completeness does not determine editorial orientation — a complete listing gives membership, not grouping, role phrases, or reading order
Keyword tags without heads — proposal for a weaker search-only tag with no head; set aside by ADR 089 until a need shows
Tag maintenance and derived browsing — proposal to test temporary topic groupings and reviewed tag suggestions before changing the canonical tag structure

Quality signals for KB evaluation — graph-topology, content-proxy, and LLM-hybrid signals combined into a weak composite oracle
Notes need quality scores to scale curation — recomputable scores rank candidates once connect retrieves too many
Link graph plus timestamps enables make-like staleness detection — existing links plus timestamps flag possibly stale notes without new annotation

Maintenance capacity must match harmful-artifact inflow — quality holds only while prevention, detection, and repair keep pace with risk-weighted inflow
Cheap adoption and weak retirement accumulate cost — cheap structural additions become debt when retiring them lacks an equally operative path

Maintenance operations catalogue should stage stable procedures for instructions — the staging catalogue of periodic operations before they become instructions
Periodic KB hygiene should be externally triggered, not embedded in routing — audits run on an external trigger, not from always-loaded routing docs
Traversal improvements should be deferred via logging to avoid mid-task context switching — log an improvement noticed while reading and fix it in a separate pass
Periodic connect-report mining — proposal to mine connect reports on a schedule, automating the triage step from noticed connection to candidate

kb-maintenance — the parent: curation is the collection-level half of keeping the KB healthy
review-system — sibling: LLM review of individual notes
claims-and-grounding — sibling: whether a note's claims hold and are supported
document-system — the tag-README type and validation that enforce the completeness mark
observability — shares the staleness and quality-signal notes
links — the link graph that staleness detection and quality signals read