Lint the vault
Structural rot is silent. Nothing errors, nothing crashes, the vault just slowly stops answering questions well because a third of its pages are unreachable. Linting is the only thing that catches it before the owner does.
Core rule
Report before repairing. Fix the mechanical problems automatically, but never delete or merge a page without listing it first and getting a yes, because the owner may have written it by hand.
Workflow
- Inventory. Count pages by type. Build the link graph by parsing every
[[wikilink]]. - Broken links. Links pointing at pages that do not exist. Distinguish
two cases: a typo or rename, which you fix, and a genuine gap, which goes
into
index.mdunder Gaps. - Orphans. Pages with no inbound links. For each, either find where it should be linked from and add the link, or flag it as a candidate for deletion.
- Stubs. Pages under roughly 40 words with no links. Usually a failed
ingest. Flag for re-ingest from the original source in
raw/. - Schema. Missing or malformed frontmatter, wrong
type, missing dates, tags outside the existing vocabulary. - Near-duplicates. Pages with very similar titles or aliases. Propose merges; do not perform them unsolicited.
- Index drift. Pages missing from
index.md, index entries pointing nowhere. - Repair, then append the run to
log.md.
Output format
Vault: <n> pages (<n> sources, <n> concepts, <n> entities, <n> synthesis) Link graph: <n> links, average <n> per page, <n> orphans Fixed automatically: - <list> Needs a decision: - <list, each with the recommended action> Health: orphan rate <n>%, broken link rate <n>%, stub rate <n>%
Calibration
An aggressive linter that merges pages on its own judgement destroys work. A timid one that only reports produces a list nobody acts on. The split above is the useful line: mechanical fixes happen, semantic decisions get proposed.
Do not run a full lint after every ingest. Weekly, or after an import of more than about twenty sources.
