The problem#

The wiki stores facts as sentences on pages, and a page is the only scope a fact can have. But almost nothing in Gyrealm is true of a page. Facts are true of an extent — of the whole habitat or of one room, for an era or for one afternoon — and the page a fact happens to be written on is an accident of which article someone was drafting that day.

Three consequences follow, and each of them is load-bearing for a book:

• A fact cannot be stated once at the scope where it actually holds. The habitat’s rotation rate is needed by Scimitar Falls, by Landscapes of Coriopolis, and by any scene involving anything that falls. Neither page can inherit it, so each restates it or omits it, and restatements drift.
• Two facts cannot be shown to conflict. Conflict means overlapping in space and time with different values. Pages overlap in subject, which is a weaker and far noisier signal — and one that only a human reading both pages at once can evaluate.
• Nothing can be retrieved at the scale a scene needs. Drafting at the falls means loading whole articles, because there is no smaller addressable unit to ask for.

A fourth consequence is about authority rather than structure. The wiki is simultaneously the reference work and the artifact being checked. Prose asserts; an assertion that survives review becomes canon whether or not anybody decided it. There is no step at which a detail is promoted from written to true.

Observed instances#

All of these are live in the repository.

1. A geometry question no page owns#

Is the 2 km gap radial or axial? The spatial-consistency bundle documents both readings shipped simultaneously and names the diagnostic that separates them. The reason it could persist is structural: no page owns “the geometry of Coriopolis” as data. The radius, length, gap, and level stack are scattered through prose in three articles, so there is no single value for a new page to contradict — only sentences to be locally consistent with.

Undated source material in notes/CoriopolisDropbox/SkyGeometry.pdf turns out to bear directly on this. It is a textless vector drawing of two concentric circles with an inner/outer radius ratio of exactly 0.800, plus a sightline from the outer circle drawn tangent to the inner one. At Coriopolis’s 10 km outer radius that is an 8 km inner radius and a 2 km radial gap. Nothing in the wiki knew this file existed, because the wiki has nowhere to put a number.

2. A number migrating between axes#

Five of six renderings of Dawn at Scimitar Falls attached the habitat’s 80 km axial length to the sky, a span that does not exist around a 62.8 km circumference. This is prose inventing state. Nothing caught it, because there was no state for it to be checked against — only a prompt written in the same medium as the thing it was constraining.

3. A decade of decisions the wiki cannot see#

notes/CoriopolisDropbox/ holds earlier source material containing facts the wiki lacks and, in places, contradicts:

• Scimitar Falls is 700 m, from a 50 m lip widening to ~100 m. The spatial-consistency bundle lists the height as unspecified and assumes 500 m.
• A prime meridian exists: “Greenwich Avenue runs along zero degrees longitude” — and the circumferential coordinate is given in degrees, where the wiki gives kilometres.
• The sky was already specified: “a Sun that rises in the east, arcs to south and sets in the west” — the Earth-mimicking option, which the scene prompt later overrode without recording that it was overriding anything.
• Population is 853,000; Coriopolis says “thousands.”
• The bombing is dated 17 October 2118, at L5, with two devices detonated and the third averted.
• And one plain error: the cascade is described as curving eastward, which is the wrong sign. Falling water deflects west.

None of this is reconcilable by reading. It is reconcilable by having a place where a fact can be written down once, with a scope and a provenance, so that the next assertion has something to collide with.

4. The same quantity given three values#

Coriopolis says “thousands of inhabitants.” Gyrealm says gyrealms support “tens of thousands to millions.” The source notes say 853,000. As written, the flagship habitat is the least populated in the setting.

5. An origin that is only half defined#

The coordinate system fixes the origin as the axial midpoint and then expresses positions as “5 kilometers east of the origin” — but no circumferential zero is ever established, so that phrase has no referent. The wrapping axis has no datum. (Both coordinate pages also call the circumferential coordinate a “cylindrical analogue of latitude”; it is the analogue of longitude.)

Why this world is unusually tractable#

The pessimistic reading is that a novel needs a database. The optimistic one is more interesting: in a cylinder, an unusual share of the facts are computable rather than merely recorded.

Gravity is ω²r, so it falls out of a radius. Coriolis deflection falls out of a drop height. Sightlines fall out of the radius ratio the sky diagram draws. Circumferential separation falls out of modular arithmetic. On Earth, “how far is it and what can she see from there” requires data. Here it requires a formula and four constants.

That is the case for a model rather than a better filing system. A filing system can only return what someone wrote down. A model can answer questions nobody thought to ask, which is exactly the position a drafting writer is in.

What has been settled#

• The model and the wiki are peers with a declared split. The model owns anything positional, temporal, or physical — coordinates, extents, trajectories, step-functioned facts, and the geometric rules. The wiki owns everything else — etymology, culture, history, description — and cites the model for its numbers. This supersedes the unqualified “the wiki is the source of truth” in .claude/rules/story-voice.md only within the model’s domain.
• Tooling lives in this repo.
• Nothing is built yet. The structure is still under design; see candidate designs.