0004 · Three spaces: raw, wiki, output

Status: Accepted · 2026-09-22

Context

A knowledge base that mixes an uploaded PDF, a curated onboarding page, and last quarter's generated report in one undifferentiated pile cannot answer "what do we actually know?" — and an agent searching it cannot tell evidence from conclusion from disposable artifact.

Decision

Every document belongs to exactly one space.

Space	Holds	Writable
raw	Verbatim ingested material	No — supersede only
wiki	Curated knowledge	Yes
output	Task artifacts	Yes

Spaces are a property of the document, not a folder. Path and slug handle hierarchy.

Consequences

• Search can be scoped to the space that suits the question: wiki to answer it, raw to source it.
• Deleting an output never loses knowledge, which makes cleanup safe and therefore likely.
• Provenance is a normal link from wiki into raw, so backlinks on a raw document show everything distilled out of it.
• Raw immutability is a real constraint. A typo in an ingested document cannot be fixed in place; it is corrected by ingesting a corrected version, leaving both.
• Moving a document between spaces is a deliberate operation, not a rename.

Alternatives rejected

One space with tags. Simpler, and tags cannot carry the write rule — "agents may rewrite this in place" is not something a label should decide.

A folder convention. Unenforceable. A rule that only holds when everyone remembers it is not a rule, and the whole point is that agents write here too.

Mutable raw. Convenient, and it destroys the property that makes raw worth having: if it can be edited, nothing derived from it can be trusted to reflect what was actually received.

Resolved

2026-09-22 — Raw immutability was carried as an open question when this record was accepted. Confirmed: raw is strictly immutable. Correcting ingested material means superseding it with a new ingestion, which leaves both versions and an audit trail. No in-place edit, for anyone, including admins.

Amendment

2026-10-07 — There are no admins any more (0013), so "including admins" above no longer names anyone. The rule itself is unchanged: raw is immutable for every person, and management, which runs the instance, never reads or writes what any document says.

2026-10-15 — A raw document can now gain a version, from a newer copy of its source and from nothing else: importing a newer export into the folder an earlier one filled brings each changed page up to date, with the earlier text kept in its history (0016). No person or agent edits raw.