Contributor wiki content

Two directories under gaia/wiki/ are excluded from the end user tarball by .gaia/release-exclude:

• wiki/entities/: named systems, products, and people tracked across the codebase.
• wiki/meta/: process and convention pages about the wiki itself.

Three individual concept and decision pages are also excluded: wiki/concepts/Release Workflow.md, wiki/decisions/Bundle-time Scrub.md, and wiki/decisions/Forensics Triage Workflow.md.

The user-facing wiki workflow (/gaia wiki sync, /gaia wiki consolidate, /gaia wiki lint) lives in end user docs. This page covers content that contributors maintain on the template repo’s own wiki.

wiki/entities/

Pages here describe named entities the GAIA team tracks. Current entries:

• GAIA.md: the project itself, including history, naming convention, and supporting links.
• Steven Sacks.md: author and maintainer.

Entity pages use the entity type frontmatter with an entity_type discriminator (project, person, etc.).

When to add: a new entity becomes worth tracking on its own page when it gets cross-linked from concept or decision pages and when its identity is useful to disambiguate from other names. Generic concepts go under wiki/concepts/, not here.

wiki/meta/

Pages here describe the wiki’s own process. The directory currently holds wiki lint reports and consolidate reports dated by run, plus a dashboard. The reports are generated artifacts of /gaia wiki lint and /gaia wiki consolidate runs.

When to add: a new meta page is appropriate when it documents how the wiki itself works (a new convention, a new dashboard, a new workflow). Generated lint and consolidate reports land here automatically; do not write them by hand.

gaia:maintainer-only block convention

Some pages under wiki/concepts/, wiki/decisions/, .claude/, and .specify/extensions/gaia/ ship to end users but contain blocks that do not. The block convention is:

<!-- gaia:maintainer-only:start -->
This block is contributor-only. It gets stripped from the end user
tarball by the bundle-time scrub during release.
<!-- gaia:maintainer-only:end -->

The shipped file is a subset of the source: the markers and everything between them get removed by the scrub before the tarball builds. The literal phrase is maintainer-only; this is the on-disk identifier and matches the comment text in .gaia/release-exclude and the step name in release.yml. Public-facing references in the docs site use “Contributors.”

When to use the block convention rather than path-level exclusion: use blocks when most of a page is end user-relevant but a section needs to stay internal. Use path-level exclusion (an entry in .gaia/release-exclude) when the entire file is contributor-only.

Cross-references

• end user wiki workflow: see the /gaia wiki skill family in end user docs.
• The .gaia/release-exclude manifest is the authoritative path-level exclusion list. Anything matched there is also skipped by gaia-maintainer release manifest, so the end user manifest never references files an end user cannot have.