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Work Vault Project Directives Addendum

0. Status

Version: 0.4 Date initiated: 2026-06-21 Scope: project-level directives for branch splitting, published-item handling, and duplicate treatment.

This addendum supplements the active intake protocol.

0A. Processing Priority

• Prefer semantic extraction and page enrichment over new ingestion whenever the existing wiki already contains the relevant foundation.
• When a project is already represented in the wiki, deepen the existing pages before introducing new branches or accepting more intake.
• Use new intake primarily to support missing foundations, not to bypass unfinished interpretation of the material already in hand.
• If a new file only repeats a known branch, treat it as reinforcement for the existing page rather than as a prompt for another split.

1. Branching Rule

• If a file or cluster reads like a durable branch, give it its own page even when the branch is small.
• Keep the page attached to its parent corpus through lineage notes and links.
• Do not force small but stable branches to stay buried under a larger umbrella page.
• If a branch or artifact begins to recur as a stable idea across multiple pages, seed or deepen a concept page and link it from the relevant project pages and the Concepts index.
• Do not leave a durable branch page as a pure navigation stub when the content supports a brief semantic read.
• When the page is already established, expand its semantic compression before splitting it again.

2. Published-Item Rule

• For HTML-published items, keep the HTML form primary.
• For non-HTML source artifacts, treat DOCX and PDF as archived witness/reference files and use Markdown as the working representation for wiki digestion.
• When a document is ingested from DOCX or PDF, create or update a Markdown wiki page that carries the extracted working read, links, and semantic structure.
• Archive DOCX or MD companions unless the page offers them as downloads or the companion is required for coherence.
• Treat companion exports as auxiliary unless a page explicitly promotes them.
• If the wiki page already exists, enrich its semantic content before creating additional structural layers.

3. Working-Format Rule

• Markdown is the standard working format for the wiki and for extracted source representations.
• Preserve DOCX and PDF originals as immutable intake witnesses unless a later archival move is explicitly required.
• Prefer the Markdown page for ongoing edits, semantic extraction, cross-linking, and cleanup passes.
• Reserve HTML as the primary form only when the artifact is inherently web-published or HTML-native.
• For already-represented projects, semantic extraction and synthesis outrank additional intake unless new source material materially changes the branch.

4. Duplicate Treatment

• Continue treating exact duplicates as witness or snapshot material after inventory.
• Collapse duplicates only when the surviving record can preserve multiple collapse parents.
• Preserve file content; change navigation and metadata, not the underlying text.

5. Exclusion Rule

• Files that are obviously personal in nature may be eliminated from the incoming set once they have been inventoried and judged non-essential to the wiki.
• Documents that are clearly not original work, including third-party research papers and whitepapers, may likewise be eliminated from incoming when they do not serve as provenance, comparison evidence, or required context.
• Keep provenance when a non-original document is needed to explain a branch, cite an influence, or preserve a review decision.