Purpose

Zwikipedia is designed to make the history and authority of an article understandable. A reader should not need to know how the editing software works, but the editorial workflow must prevent an unreviewed draft from silently replacing approved material. That distinction is especially important when the same subject has in-universe, source-canon, and real-world creation records.

1. Proposal and classification

An article begins with a subject, working title, context, intended readers, and a reason to exist. It should be assigned a meaningful category and content type. Zwikipedia includes independent works and source canons from multiple authors; its sources are not limited to Clint or John Conroe. For example, Markus Matthews is the source author whose canon informs A Bounty of Dad Jokes; that source credit is distinct from Clint’s fan-fiction interpretation and Zwikipedia’s editorial account of it.

A fictional subject needs a clear perspective and continuity. Distinguish the original work’s author and source canon, Clint’s additions or interpretations within Crossroads, and Zwikipedia’s editorial contributions such as summaries, organization, and attribution. None silently changes the authority of the others. Crossroads is not interchangeable with an originating author’s canon or with a Real World creation history.

Before producing new material, editors should check whether the article already exists. An existing glossary with missing entries calls for a revision, not a near-duplicate page.

2. Drafting and evidence

The draft contains the article text, an accurate short summary, relevant source information, proposed related links, and any necessary article-specific disclaimer. Some articles can be written directly from approved project decisions. Others need outside research or a review of a creative source; claims should not be filled in from speculation.

Preview text should be an accurate editorial summary or a reliable, accessible fallback. It must describe the article's actual subject, not merely repeat the page title or display raw markup. An in-universe preview must retain the article’s in-universe voice. Creation explanations, disclaimers, and editorial continuity warnings stay behind deliberately opened details or links, apart from the specifically permitted footer treatment; they must not interrupt the default reading experience.

3. Review

Review should check factual support, correct continuity, naming, links, content structure, attribution, imagery, and any restriction on source material. For technical pages, it should also distinguish implemented capabilities from intended designs. For creative pages, identify source authorship and original canon separately from Clint’s interpretations and Zwikipedia’s editorial contributions. Editorial review or a useful citation does not itself grant canon authority.

Owner review of a manuscript is not equivalent to selecting that revision for production publication. The review record should make the distinction explicit.

4. Publication

In the documented Zwikipedia model, an article has a stable identity and a sequence of immutable revisions. A public page resolves through a selected eligible public revision. Publishing chooses the approved version; it should not rewrite older versions or expose staging-only material.

The production selection remains subject to authorized controls. Publication should be followed by verification that the public URL renders the intended revision, its preview, categories, disclaimers, and related content.

5. Index and relationship refresh

Zwikipedia currently has a functioning XML sitemap at sitemap.xml, advertised by robots.txt. Public verification on November 1, 2026 found 42 unique article URLs; this is an observation of that date, not a permanent article count.

The existing implementation reads eligible selected public revisions directly for the Articles index, category pages, homepage Recent additions, curated Unexpected Connections, related content, and sitemap. There is no separate index-rebuild service to add: changing the selected publication revision is reflected by subsequent public reads. A curated connection or category assignment still requires its own appropriate editorial input; publishing does not invent relationships or taxonomy.

Draft-only changes must not leak into published indexes. Categories are currently reviewed navigation configuration, and related links are article-level records; those relationships should not be described as immutable revision fields. If caching is introduced later, its invalidation will require an appropriately scoped design rather than being claimed as an existing feature.

6. Revision and correction

Corrections create a reviewable new revision. Once approved and selected, the new revision replaces the public presentation without erasing the history of the previous one. A correction should also update any stale excerpt or link based on the earlier version.

7. Verification and maintenance

Useful routine checks include published articles missing categories or summaries, broken internal links, inconsistent slugs, unselected public revisions, stale sitemap entries, and the difference between total article records and publicly eligible article records. Diagnostics should say whether a count is of drafts, published articles, category assignments, or distinct categorized articles; these values need not be equal.

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