Wiki Merge — Collapse an Overlap Cluster

Folds one or more concept slugs into a single canonical entry. Preserves provenance, rewrites incoming wikilinks across atlas / books / concepts / project knowledge folders, deletes the losers, and denylists them so the Saturday wiki-grow cron doesn't re-promote.

When to Use

• Right after wiki-curate flags an overlap cluster in Section A and you've decided which slug should be canonical.
• Manual cleanup when you notice two concepts that should be one.

When NOT to Use

• For trivial renames — keep both files and add an alias.
• For tag normalisation — that's edit-in-place, not a merge.
• When the "overlap" turns out to be a genuine sub-concept relation — keep both, add a [[wikilink]] reference between them instead.

What it does

uv run python scripts/wiki-merge.py <winner> <loser1> [<loser2> ...]
uv run python scripts/wiki-merge.py --apply <winner> <loser1> [<loser2> ...]

Steps performed (in order, only on --apply):

1. Read winner + every loser concept file under ~/vault/concepts/.
2. Build merged body — winner's body verbatim, then each loser's body under a ## From <loser-slug> section. Each section includes a small admonition naming the source project + promotion date for traceability. Sub-headings in loser bodies are demoted by one level (## → ###) so they don't compete with the new section delimiter.
3. Build merged frontmatter — winner's fields preserved; tags becomes the union of winner ∪ loser tags; a new fold_in_sources: block records each loser's slug + source_project + promoted_on date; last_merged: is set to today.
4. Write merged content back to the winner's file.
5. Rewrite wikilinks — every [[<loser-slug>]] (with or without alias suffix) across atlas topics, book chapters, other concepts, and project knowledge folders gets rewritten to [[<winner-slug>|<original-display-text>]]. The alias keeps the original display label visible so the change isn't jarring on pages that referenced the loser by name.
6. Delete loser files from ~/vault/concepts/.
7. Append to denylist — each loser slug is added to ~/vault/concepts/.denylist with a comment noting the merge date. This stops the Saturday wiki-grow cron from re-promoting the loser slug if a project knowledge article with that slug still exists.

Dry-run output

Default invocation (no --apply) prints a plan:

Merge plan (dry-run):
  Winner:  goodharts-law  (concepts/goodharts-law.md)
  Fold in: goodhart-taxonomy, goodhart-resistance
  Merged file size: 11666 chars (winner was 3516)
  Wikilink rewrites: 12 file(s)
    concepts/strategic-classification.md: 1 occurrence(s)
    .../knowledge/goodhart-resistance.md: 1 occurrence(s)
    ...
  Denylist additions: goodhart-taxonomy, goodhart-resistance
  Files to delete: concepts/goodhart-taxonomy.md, concepts/goodhart-resistance.md

(dry-run — pass --apply to perform the merge)

Inspect the file count and the rewrite targets. If anything looks wrong (e.g. a loser slug is wildly overrepresented across the corpus suggesting it's actually a distinct concept), abort and reconsider.

Apply

uv run python scripts/wiki-merge.py --apply goodharts-law goodhart-taxonomy goodhart-resistance

Performs all six steps. After the run:

• ~/vault/concepts/goodharts-law.md contains the merged content with fold-in provenance in frontmatter.
• goodhart-taxonomy.md and goodhart-resistance.md are deleted.
• All atlas/books/concepts/project-knowledge files that wikilinked to the loser slugs now wikilink to the winner with the original display label preserved as the alias.
• ~/vault/concepts/.denylist has two new lines.

Verify with wiki-curate — the goodhart cluster should be gone on the next run.

Safety properties

• Dry-run is default. Forgetting --apply previews only.
• Loser frontmatter preserved in fold_in_sources: — even though the loser file is deleted, the merged file records source_project + promoted_on for each fold-in, so the provenance is recoverable.
• Wikilinks preserve display labels — rewrite produces [[winner|Original Display]] form, so a topic page that wrote [[Goodhart Taxonomy]] will still render "Goodhart Taxonomy" after the merge, just pointing at goodharts-law now.
• Denylist prevents re-promotion — if a project still has <loser-slug>.md in its knowledge folder, the next Saturday cron won't re-promote it.

Anti-patterns

• Don't merge a curated concept INTO an auto-generated one. If you must, swap winner/loser. Curated content should be the canonical surface.
• Don't merge concepts from different domains just because slugs share a token (e.g. model token in language-model and linear-model). Use judgement.
• Don't merge without dry-running first. The dry-run output is the only confirmation step.

Cross-References