A

Comparison

Reverie#

Reverie is the strongest current example.

What works:

  • It has a local guide at wiki/_meta/wiki-conventions.md.
  • It has a readable primary folder shape: people/, organizations/, legal/, and accounts/.
  • Pages are about durable subjects, not source files.
  • Source notes explain what each source supports.
  • Citations sit near factual claims.
  • Sensitive records are summarized with explicit non-reproduction rules.
  • Health is clean: no unused sources, no missing sources, no legacy frontmatter.

The pages feel like articles. A page owns one subject, gives a lead, then sections the reader would actually need.

CodeAlmanac#

CodeAlmanac still has strong pages, especially around provider boundaries, sync flow, source provenance, and wiki organization doctrine. The problem is not lack of knowledge.

What degraded:

  • Pages often became dense memory deposits instead of clean reader articles.
  • Source lists often record everything inspected, not only evidence used.
  • Some pages mix current architecture, migration history, product strategy, research notes, and prompt doctrine.
  • Broad topics such as agents and product-positioning are carrying too much navigation weight.
  • The flat page list hides page families and makes coverage harder to see.
  • Prompt guidance accumulated project philosophy inline and started to drift.
  • Health catches graph integrity, but not whether the page is the right shape.

The failure mode is not "no guidance." It is guidance without a compact, maintained editorial mechanism.

General Almanac Manual#

General Almanac's newer doctrine is cleaner:

  • prompts stay thin;
  • detailed doctrine lives in wiki/_manual/;
  • local rules live in wiki/_meta/wiki-conventions.md;
  • pages are subject articles;
  • sources are evidence;
  • conflicts and source gaps are first-class;
  • folders are a browse surface, not identity;
  • Garden updates both pages and local conventions.

That model should be adapted back to CodeAlmanac, but code wikis need their own page families.

What To Preserve From CodeAlmanac#

Keep:

  • markdown pages as source of truth;
  • source/citation frontmatter;
  • double-bracket links;
  • topic DAG as reading neighborhoods;
  • almanac health;
  • lifecycle operations;
  • Garden as the maintenance loop;
  • code-specific retrieval by file mentions;
  • "intelligence in prompts, not pipelines."

Do not replace this with a strict schema or proposal/apply workflow.

What To Import From Reverie / General Almanac#

Import:

  • a manual-first guidance model;
  • local wiki conventions as a maintained page;
  • primary browse shelves or folders;
  • article leads as the retrieval unit;
  • source notes that say exactly what is supported;
  • citation discipline as a quality gate;
  • explicit source-gap/conflict prose;
  • Garden responsibility for keeping conventions current.