chemenu/instructions/kb-profiles.md

type, name, description, manual

type	name	description	manual
types/instruction.md	kb-profiles	Ready-made answers for kb/CONVENTIONS.md and each COLLECTION.md - the proven collection contracts and language profiles this stack has shipped, offered as a palette to adopt or adapt, never as a binding source.	true

Pick a profile for a collection or for this instance's conventions

This page is a palette, not an enum. Each kb/<name>/COLLECTION.md stays authoritative for its own collection and kb/CONVENTIONS.md for the instance as a whole; an entry here is a proven starting point, nothing more. Adopting one means copying its text into that file - not pointing at this page and inheriting whatever it says later. Nothing in the stack reads this document, and profile: in a contract's frontmatter records where the text came from, not where it lives.

That direction is deliberate and it is the opposite of how this repo used to work. Language, tone, naming and the relationship vocabulary sat in kb/CONTRACT.md, a file dist export ships verbatim - so every instance that wanted something else edited a stack file, and an upstream merge handed the stack's answer back. What binds is now the instance's; what ships is this catalogue, and it binds nothing.

When to run

• Setting up a new instance: the KB-language step of setup-instance.md sends you here to fill kb/CONVENTIONS.md.
• Adding a collection to an existing instance, and wanting a contract that already works rather than a blank one.
• Rewriting an existing COLLECTION.md or kb/CONVENTIONS.md and wanting to see what the alternatives were.

Not for changing what the stack enforces. That is kb/CONTRACT.md, and it is not a profile.

Steps

1. Decide what you are filling. Two different files, and they are not interchangeable:

   File	Holds	Profiles below
   kb/CONVENTIONS.md	Language, section headings, naming forms, tone, relationship labels, confidence rubric - once per instance	Language profiles
   kb/<name>/COLLECTION.md	What one collection holds, its quality goal, its local linking and naming rules	Collection profiles

2. Copy the entry's text into the file, then edit it until it is true of this instance. A profile you adopted and then changed is still that profile's profile: value - the field records the starting point, not a promise of fidelity.

3. Record it. profile: <name> in the file's frontmatter, or profile: none for a collection written from scratch. wikitool docs verify checks the field is there; it does not check the value against this page, because a collection an instance invented has no entry here to name.

4. Set required_by_stack: on a collection - and set it correctly. This one is not a choice: it says whether wikitool resolves against the collection by name, and docs verify checks it against the stack's own list. sources is true, everything else is false. See kb/CONTRACT.md § Collections.

Language profiles

A language profile answers all of kb/CONVENTIONS.md at once. There is one today, because one is what this repo has actually run.

german

The profile this repo's own instance uses, and the reason this catalogue exists: it was the stack's hardcoded behaviour until the conventions file existed.

Decides	Value
language:	de
sections:	Beziehungen / Siehe auch / Fußnoten
Naming	Human-readable titles with spaces; singular for entities; a decision named like any other concept, no adr-NNN- prefix; X vs Y for comparisons
Tone	Wikipedia register, with a German buzzword and filler list
Relationship labels	hängt ab von · verwendet · implementiert · erweitert · ersetzt · steht in Konflikt mit · benötigt · erzeugt · konsumiert · besitzt · pflegt · läuft auf · verwandt mit
Confidence rubric	0.5 base, +0.2 per supporting source (max +0.6), recency and source-quality bonuses; hedge with "möglicherweise"/"kann" below 0.6, "unsicher"/"unbestätigt" below 0.4
Terminology	german-terminology.md - which English terms stay English, and which have a settled German form

The full text to copy is this repo's own kb/CONVENTIONS.md. An instance adopting it takes that file, not this table; the table is what the profile decides, so you can tell at a glance whether it is the one you want.

Adopting it also means keeping german-terminology.md. An instance on any other language deletes or replaces that file - it is the profile's lookup material, not the stack's.

english

What kb/CONVENTIONS.md.template ships as its default, so "adopt english" means "fill in the template and change nothing structural". sections: are Relationships / See Also / Footnotes, which are also the names this stack wrote before it had a conventions file - so a corpus that predates the split needs no translation pass to adopt this profile.

There is no worked text for the rest of it. The template's placeholders are the questions; german above is what a filled answer looks like.

Writing a third one

A language profile is not a translation of german. Two of its sections are judgment about a language rather than vocabulary in it - which foreign technical terms stay untranslated, and how to hedge a low-confidence claim - and those are exactly the two that read as awkward when translated mechanically. Write them, do not convert them.

The one part that is mechanical: section_aliases:. Whatever the corpus used before goes in that list, and the pages then migrate one at a time instead of all at once.

Collection profiles

The four collections this repo runs. Each is a whole COLLECTION.md, and the text to copy is the file itself - dist export ships each one as kb/<name>/COLLECTION.md.template, which a new instance adopts by renaming. What follows is what each decides, so you can tell whether you want it.

entities

Concrete, pointable things: projects, deployed systems, tools, technologies, people.

• Quality goal: pointability plus currency - what the thing is, where it actually is, and whether that is still true.
• Areas driven by the entity_type: field: projects/, systems/, tools/, technologies/, people/. Areas, not collections - they inherit the contract and carry no COLLECTION.md.
• Per-area emphasis spelled out, so a system page is not written like a technology page.
• required_by_stack: false.

Take it when the wiki is about things that exist. Adapt the area list first: it is the part most likely to be wrong for another domain.

concepts

Ideas rather than things: architectures, patterns, protocols, workflows, recurring problems, and the decisions taken about them.

• Quality goal: explanatory sufficiency - the page answers why it is done this way without the reader opening the entity pages that use it.
• Carries the ADR shape: context, decision, consequences, status, and the rule that a superseded decision is never rewritten.
• Routes head-to-head arguments out to comparisons/ rather than hosting them.
• required_by_stack: false.

Take it whenever entities is taken - the split between the two is what keeps either from becoming an essay.

sources

One page per ingested source, carrying the raw_files: provenance every citation resolves against.

• Quality goal: faithful compression - what this source said, not what was concluded from it. A source page improved beyond its source is no longer evidence.
• Titles carry the Source - prefix, applied by wikitool new source.
• required_by_stack: **true**. sources coverage, [^cite-id] resolution and kb/provenance.md resolve against the name sources.

Not optional in the way the others are. An instance may rewrite its authoring rules and may not rename or drop it.

comparisons

Structured head-to-head evaluations of two or more things that already have pages.

• Quality goal: decidability - named, checkable dimensions and a stated trade-off, so a reader with a concrete situation can choose.
• Every subject must already have a page; a comparison is a view over existing knowledge.
• Exempt from the orphan check - comparisons are reached through the catalog, not through inbound prose links.
• required_by_stack: false.

Skip it in a wiki that records rather than decides. It is the one of the four that is genuinely optional.

Decision points

• A profile is almost right? Copy and edit. There is no partial adoption and no override file - the copy is the mechanism, and profile: still records where it started.
• Two collections want the same profile? Fine. profile: is not unique, and two collections holding different subject matter under the same authoring rules is an ordinary outcome.
• Changing sections: after pages exist? That is a corpus migration, not an edit. Put the old names in section_aliases: first, then translate page by page - the tool keeps finding the old headings for as long as the alias stands. See migrate-corpus.md.
• Tempted to make this page binding - to have COLLECTION.md say profile: entities and nothing else? Do not. That is the arrangement this split was written to end: the instance would be bound by a file the stack ships and upgrades, which is how an upstream merge changes an instance's authoring rules without anyone deciding to.

Scope

Covers what an instance authors under kb/. It says nothing about what the stack enforces (kb/CONTRACT.md), what a page structurally is (types/type-spec.md), or how a command behaves (tools/CONTRACT.md). None of those are profiles, and none of them are the instance's to change.