Canon and Mirrors

The document system deciding where policies and decisions live and where they get quoted from. The same policy sat in both the repository and the team wiki, and the wiki, which is what non-engineering colleagues actually open, carried no sign of being a copy.

Copies were stating stale values with confidence. Rather than removing the mirrors, each mirror was made to declare itself: a summary instead of a full copy, pinned with a banner naming the source path and the sync date. What could not be automated is documented as manually maintained.

The same problem turned up elsewhere, so repeat mistakes stopped accumulating as cautions and moved into machine-enforced checks. Capture, classify, promote, retire: retirement is part of the procedure so the ledger does not only grow.