Wiki Decontamination
The 2026-08 de-slop campaign: marker-guided repair of the May 2026 generation incident, the repair protocol, and the documented marker floor.
On this page
The incident#
In May 2026 a generation incident salted otherwise-real English wiki entries with telegraphic filler prose — sentences that pad or restate without adding content. The entries’ substance (sources, structure, claims) was real; the damage was register-level. The repair job was therefore repair, not rewrite: remove the filler, keep the scholarship.
The marker#
The filler carries a reliable lexical tell: the words “substantive” / “substantively” used as padding (“operates substantively as…”, “treated at substantive length…”). The campaign used per-entry marker counts to build its worklists, then read every flagged passage in context — the marker finds candidates; the read decides. The slop register around a marker is also a signal: empty roadmap paragraphs, “deserves articulation” lead-ins, and leaked editorial scaffolding (“the v1 entry the corpus is converting…”) cluster near it.
Repair protocol#
Per entry:
- Read the entire file first. Never repair from grep context alone.
- For each marker occurrence: if the sentence carries real information awkwardly, rewrite it cleanly without the filler word; if it is pure padding, delete the sentence or passage. Genuinely grammatical uses stay and are documented in the floor list below.
- Scan for adjacent filler without the marker. Repair minimally; leave clean scholarly prose alone — when unsure, leave it.
- Frontmatter hygiene: a
descriptionover 300 characters moves its full text tosummary(first field in[extra]), gets a fresh question-answering 150–160-characterdescription, a one-sentencetldr, and 5–8keywords. Stampeditorial_pass = "2026-08". - Verify: zero unjustified markers; frontmatter parses as TOML;
citeand shortcode token counts unchanged before and after; the site builds. - Report, don’t silently fix. Factual or canon issues found along the way (miscited motif-index codes, list-count errors, citation form) are reported first and fixed in separate follow-up commits after editorial sign-off.
Hard rule throughout: never invent or delete citations, shortcode calls, reference blocks, or [extra.references] tables.
Outcome and the marker floor#
The campaign closed on 2026-08-06: tiered repairs across the ~140-entry English wiki corpus, a final Phase 5 batch of ten entries, and a corpus-wide tail sweep clearing 86 residual occurrences across 38 files. The English corpus floor is eight documented-legitimate occurrences in seven entries:
| Entry | Occurrences | Why it stays |
|---|---|---|
mytheme | 1 | “Mythemes are relational, not substantive” — the actual Lévi-Straussian claim |
infinity | 2 | grammatical uses |
watchers | 1 | method-vs-substance contrast |
pangaea | 1 | method-vs-substance contrast |
ezekiel | 1 | method-vs-substance contrast |
list-of-prophets-and-religions | 1 | method-vs-substance contrast |
crop-circles | 1 | infobox field label substantive_residual_questions |
Any “substantive” occurrence beyond this list is suspect by definition — treat it as new contamination and repair it under this protocol.
Translations#
Locale entries with translation_status = "metadata_only" carry the English body verbatim; their repair is a mechanical body splice from the repaired English, verified byte-identical against the pre-repair body before writing (done for mytheme across all nine locales). True translations are instead re-fanned from the clean English.
Campaign record#
Working notes, tier lists, and per-phase decisions live in .claude/plans/wiki-decontamination.md in the www.wheelofheaven.world repo. The project-level summary is in the Changelog.
Related: Editorial Passes.