Epistemic status

🌱 / 🌿 / 🌳 + last-tended date. Every page declares how confident it is and when it was last looked at — borrowed from Maggie Appleton.

🌳 evergreen tended 2026-05-08 convention badge confidence

flowchart LR
  seed[🌱 seedling] --> bud[🌿 budding]
  bud --> ev[🌳 evergreen]
  stub[🪨 stub] -.starts.-> seed
  ev -.if drifts.-> bud

Read next

• Patterns — where this lives in the system
• Inspiration — Maggie Appleton's garden
• Rating & priority — the cousin badge for tasks
• Glossary — the terms used in badges

Borrowed from Maggie Appleton's evergreen-notes practice. Status migrates as evidence accumulates.

A one-line declaration at the top of any human-facing page that says how grown-in this thinking is, when it was last tended, and what's still uncertain. Borrowed from Maggie Appleton's digital-garden convention. · 2026-05-08

A page without an epistemic status reads as if it were finished. Most pages here aren't. Marking the status protects the reader from over-trusting an early draft and protects the writer from having to polish before posting.

The three states

Badge	Label	Meaning
🌱	seedling	rough thought, possibly wrong, posted to think out loud
🌿	budding	reasoning is laid out, citations exist, gaps acknowledged
🌳	evergreen	tested across enough sessions to act on; updated as evidence arrives

A fourth, optional, is 🪵 deadwood — kept on the site for archive value but no longer maintained. Linked from docs/archive/ when used.

Where it goes

A blockquote line directly below the H1, of the form:

> Status: 🌿 budding · last tended 2026-05-08 · evidence: L-1668, F-EPIS3

Each part is optional, but in this order:

1. Status badge — one of the four above.
2. Last tended — ISO date of the most recent meaningful edit (not a typo fix). If nobody touched the substance for >90 days, the page is implicitly stale and should drop a level (evergreen → budding, budding → seedling).
3. Evidence — lessons / frontiers / experiments the page leans on. Lets a reader trace the claim back to data without searching.

ASCII fallback

For environments without emoji rendering (terminals, plain-text clones), use square-bracket tags: [seedling], [budding], [evergreen], [deadwood]. The site CSS will swap these for the badge if both are present.

How a page changes status

flowchart LR
  s[🌱 seedling] -- citations + 1 round of edits --> b[🌿 budding]
  b -- holds across 3+ sessions of use --> e[🌳 evergreen]
  e -- untouched 180+ days --> d[🪵 deadwood]
  e -- contradicted --> b
  b -- contradicted --> s

Demotion is normal. The garden metaphor is the point: most things don't make it to evergreen, and that's fine — the seedling is a real contribution.

Why bother

The repo's existing rigor lives in lessons (numbered, evidence-bound) and principles (validated across sessions). The doc layer didn't have an equivalent surface, so a flashy half-finished page could read as canonical. Status badges close that gap without forcing every page through review.

Reader's win: scan for 🌳 to find what's stable. Scan for 🌱 to find what's in motion and contributable.

Anti-patterns

• Status laundering. Marking a page evergreen because you wrote it carefully. Evergreen needs use, not effort.
• Stale evergreens. Last-tended date older than 180 days with no contradictions found is suspicious — either confirm and bump the date, or demote.
• Status without evidence. A budding page with no lesson / frontier citation is just a seedling with confidence. Add the citations or drop the badge.

Inspiration

Maggie Appleton, A Brief History & Ethos of the Digital Garden (2020). The 🌱/🌿/🌳 convention is hers; this page is the local adaptation. See docs/INSPIRATION.md for the full credit.