The outline pipeline

The order of this site's story, and the way each deep dive sits beside its chapter, were not fixed in advance and then filled with evidence. The work began with the record and moved outward, so that the shape would follow what is actually held rather than a preconception of what the story ought to be.

It began with a digest: a machine reading of the whole record, compacted into a single file a drafter could work from. Two independent outlines were then drafted from it, each by a different hand working alone, so that no single drafter's blind spots could quietly decide the structure. A set of written rulings merged the two, settling case by case which draft's choice to keep and why. The merged outline went through four Codex review rounds plus orchestrator reviews, with the findings ranked and recorded. A titles pass followed, although the era names the site now carries were the owner's own. Further fixes followed from owner feedback, and they were kept with the intermediate versions.

The outline checker applies a defined structural contract. A reference in the outline that does not point to a real record fails. Every registered finding must have a place in the plan, so nothing the project has recorded is left off the map. The picture slots must hold visual material. Each era chapter needs its own column of evidence. No section may have more than two deep dives beside it. No single deep dive may be pinned to more than four sections, so the margins never swamp the story. A finding that is only probable has to be signalled as such. Any part of the plan that names a living person among its entities must carry the rule governing how that person may appear.

What the pipeline leaves behind matters as much as what it produces. Drafts, rulings and review rounds stay in the project's working files after the next version exists, kept for the project's own account and not published with the site. The site's structure is the product of those steps. Anyone with those working files can retrace it, step by step, from the finished page back to the record it was built from.