Contributor Charter

A high-bar standard for what counts as a good contribution to this wiki. The charter exists so a contributor knows the merge bar before spending time, and so the author can close PRs by reference rather than re-explanation.

This document is draft. It will mutate as real contributions accumulate and the actual failure modes become visible.

The merge bar

Most PRs are closed, not merged. The author rejects more than accepts, especially early. This is intentional: the wiki’s value is the coherence of one author’s reading of the field, and every additional contributor is a small dilution. The merge bar is the only enforcement mechanism.

A PR is in scope if it:

• Touches an active research question or a working hypothesis in a way the wiki does not already cover.
• Brings new evidence, not new opinion.
• Reads in the same voice as the rest of the wiki — English, present tense, precise, no marketing language.
• Follows the file conventions in CLAUDE.md (slugs, frontmatter, wikilinks both directions).

A PR is closed if it:

• Restates frames already in the wiki without new lift.
• Argues a position without evidence the author can verify.
• Reorganizes structure (renames, splits, merges, deletes) — those are author-only operations via /edit, not contribution targets.
• Pulls the wiki toward topics outside the paper’s scope.

What we want

The four contribution kinds, in descending order of expected volume:

• Sources we do not have. Papers, articles, books, datasets, primary documents. Drop a stub in raw/ with the citation, the URL or local path, a one-line reason it bears on the research, and the two or three wiki pages you think it touches. The author runs /ingest post-merge.
• Daily thoughts from operators. Your own stream-of-consciousness reasoning about the research questions, written from inside the operator role. Lands in raw/daily tougths/ as YYYY-MM-DD_<your-handle>.md. The author may engage with it through /reflect post-merge — selective promotion, not automatic ingestion.
• Concept refinements that touch open questions. New concept pages in wiki/04_concepts/, or sharpening of existing ones. Frontmatter must be complete. At least two wikilinks to existing pages. Status starts at draft.
• Sharpened open questions. Single clean question with a one-line rationale, proposed under an appropriate section of 05_open-questions. Useful when you can see a question the wiki should be asking but is not.

What we do not want

Out of scope, unless you can show direct bearing on where AI value lands for capital-rich operators:

• Embodied AI and robotics.
• Consumer AI and chat assistants as a primary subject. (Where consumer dynamics drive frontier-lab economics, ingest as evidence of the substrate layer — not as a category in its own right.)
• ML research and novel technical contributions.
• General AI safety and alignment debates.
• Personal-experience essays without a structural claim.
• Surface-level summaries of widely-shared frames (the bull paradigm, the bear paradigm, the geopolitics tripartite) without new lift.

If your contribution is “I think this is interesting and the wiki should cover it” without a hook into an existing hypothesis or open question, open a GitHub issue first.

Evidentiary standards

• Every non-trivial claim has a source. Either a wikilink to an existing source page in wiki/05_sources/, or — if the source is new — a stub in raw/ that the author will turn into a source page on merge.
• Quantitative claims have a data page. Numbers live in wiki/data/ as one-claim-per-file, with source-primary, source-via, and year frontmatter. Inline numbers in concept pages link out to the data page.
• Secondary syntheses are flagged as such. If your contribution is a synthesis of an LLM-generated digest, a Twitter thread, or a podcast summary, say so on the source page. Secondary syntheses are useful but they are not the same as primary sources.
• Engage with the contrary frame. If you contribute evidence supporting H2_u-curve-of-value, note where the bear-case sources (bear-case-synthesis, zitron-circular-economics, acemoglu-simple-macroeconomics, marcus-world-models-failure) push back, or why they do not apply. The wiki is structured around tension, not consensus.

Voice

• English. Present tense. Precise.
• No marketing language. No hype. No exclamation marks. No emoji anywhere.
• Italian terms preserved in parentheses where the English translation loses weight.
• Strong claims welcomed if they carry a citation or are explicitly labeled as bets.
• Peer-to-peer with smart operators. Not for the general public. Not for ML researchers.

The voice calibration is in 01_audience. Re-read it if a draft starts drifting into either explainer mode or research-paper mode — neither is correct.

Forward → reverse link rule

If your contribution links page A to page B, page B must reference page A back. The reverse link is added in the same PR, not deferred to a future cleanup pass.

The /contribute skill runs a forward → reverse link check before opening the PR. If it flags a missing reverse link, you either add it on the target page or accept the lint warning, which the author will see during review.

Per-page contributor credit

When a contributor’s work materially shapes a wiki page, that page gets a small Contributors: line in its frontmatter or in a footer block:

Contributors: <name-or-handle> (concept introduction), <name-or-handle> (source ingest)

This is in addition to the top-level CONTRIBUTORS.md file at the repository root. The roll lists everyone with at least one merged PR; the per-page line is for substantive shaping of that specific page.

Daily thoughts in raw/daily tougths/ retain the contributor’s handle in the filename and remain attributable through git history; no separate frontmatter line is needed.

How to contribute

The mechanical path is in 06_collaboration §T1. The skill is at .claude/skills/contribute/SKILL.md. The contributor-facing entry document is the repository root CONTRIBUTING.md.

Order of operations from the contributor’s side: fork → open in agentic CLI → run /contribute → branch → PR → wait for review.

Friction is the feature

Contributing requires a CLI, a git workflow, and willingness to run an agentic skill against your fork. This is deliberate. A founder or operator who can run those tools is exactly the contributor profile worth optimizing for. The friction self-selects.

“I’m sorry for everyone who is not that technical, but I think it’s the easier way you should learn.” — daily thought, 2026-05-22

What happens after merge

The author may run /ingest on a new source you contributed, /reflect on a daily thought, /edit to fold a concept page into the broader wiki structure, or /lint to verify link integrity across the merge. Your PR is the input; the post-merge author flow is the next step. Your name lands in CONTRIBUTORS.md either way.

If your PR is closed

Do not take it personally. The most common reasons:

• The contribution is in scope but the evidence does not support the claim strongly enough to merge.
• The contribution restates an existing wiki frame without new lift.
• The contribution is out of scope and should have been a GitHub issue.
• The voice is off and the rewrite cost exceeds the contribution’s value.

The author will leave a one-line reason on the PR. Iterate, or move on.

Status of this charter

status: draft. The charter itself is one of the 05_open-questions resolved in this pass. It will mutate as real contributions accumulate and the actual failure modes become visible. Material revisions are logged in wiki/log.md.

Related

• 06_collaboration — the full collaboration model. This charter operationalises §T1 of that page.
• 05_open-questions — the live decisions the wiki is still resolving; the scope-check step of /contribute reads this file.
• 00_initial-brief — the research frame the charter enforces.
• 04_distribution — what the finished paper looks like as a product; the charter governs the wiki in flight.
• 01_audience — the voice calibration the charter inherits.
• CONTRIBUTORS.md — the merged-contributor roll.