keeps an artefact
from going dark
On giving every
opaque thing
a paper trail.
No payload speaks for itself; so every opaque artefact the System keeps shall carry a written witness of where it came from, that no future hand inherits an orphan it cannot ground.
A binary artefact carries its payload and nothing of its history; left alone, it becomes an orphan no later session can place. We therefore ordain that every opaque thing the System persists shall be accompanied by a plain text witness, kept beside it, naming its origin, so that what cannot be read can still be found.
A written witness beside every payload.
No opaque artefact shall be persisted alone; a plain text sidecar shall be set down beside it.
Audio, video, machine-learning models, datasets, downloaded media: the payload itself carries no provenance. Where the System keeps such a thing, it shall write a companion file beside it, so that a future session does not find an orphan it cannot ground, unable to say where the thing came from, or when, or for which task.
The sidecar's office is to make an otherwise opaque artefact greppable in a search that reads only text.
What the witness shall record.
The sidecar shall name, at the least, the artefact's source, its title, and the day it was captured.
The minimum is fixed: a source, being the URL or other origin; a title; and a captured date, being the day the artefact was retrieved. Beyond the minimum the sidecar may carry a link back to whatever note in the long-term store refers to the artefact, and a downstream field set when processing completes, so that what remains pending may itself be surfaced by a plain text search.
The coupled shall not be parted.
Sidecar and artefact shall share a basename and a folder, and shall never be split apart.
The witness and the thing it witnesses shall bear the same basename and stand side by side. If the artefact is moved, the sidecar moves with it. Should the sidecar be hoisted into a subdirectory of its own, the coupling is the first thing the file system loses as it grows around it; and so they shall remain together.
An empty field before a guessed one.
No sidecar field shall be filled by inference; what cannot be verified shall be left empty.
When the System adds sidecars to artefacts already kept, it shall fill only what can be verified: the title from the filename, the captured date from the file's modification time, the source only where it can be recovered from an embedded identifier, such as a video identifier carried in a bracketed filename suffix.
What it cannot verify it shall leave empty, for an empty source is truer than a guessed URL. Synthesis offered as truth is worse than an honest gap.
These Articles may be amended in the open, as a charter shows its revisions.
The cursor waits for the next hand.