EI-3.7 — Editorial Validation & Series Closeout

Status: COMPLETE
Date: 2026-08-08

Scope

EI-3.7 reconciles the production repository against the final EI-1.5 editorial classification and closes EI-3 — Editorial Implementation & Information Architecture.

Classification reconciliation

Authoritative EI-1.5 totals:

• PUBLISH: 16
• REWRITE: 15
• ARCHIVE: 72
• DELETE: 125
• TOTAL: 228
• Unclassified: 0
• EI-1.3 privacy exclusions: 90, all DELETE

EI-3 implementation:

• PUBLISH: the 16 Loudmouth issues are retained as the historical collection and were normalized in EI-3.3.
• REWRITE: all 15 records have an implementation disposition through EI-3.4: seven restored/modernized Writing items and eight legacy journalism/media pages consolidated into the Journalism & Media Portfolio.
• ARCHIVE: the 72 records are governed by the EI-3.5 archive boundary. Existing historical production posts may remain chronologically reachable; absent archive-only records are not automatically republished.
• DELETE: DELETE is an exclusion state, not an archive tier. Historical DELETE items are not candidates for migration or restoration.

Production cleanup discovered during validation

The final EI-1.5 ledger showed five historical DELETE posts still present in the current Jekyll repository. EI-3.7 removed all five:

• _posts/2012-06-14-only-minor-damage.md
• _posts/2012-06-14-the-moving-process-begins.md
• _posts/2012-06-19-free-money.md
• _posts/2012-10-16-this-is-happening-right-now.md
• _posts/2013-06-04-keeping-up-with-the-intels.md

The stock _posts/2011-06-19-welcome-to-jekyll.md starter post was also removed because it is not authored paco.org content.

_posts/2012-06-14-added-a-news-plugin.md remains intentionally: the final EI-1.5 decision explicitly overrides an older delete recommendation and retains Added a video plugin as ARCHIVE after its media recovery.

Privacy validation

The final EI-1.5 source confirms all 90 Ben/Sophie records are DELETE and were never current Jekyll migration candidates. Repository code search for Sophie returns governance documentation rather than a production historical post. Ben has unrelated textual matches in current material, so name-only search is not treated as classification evidence; the item-level EI-1.5 ledger remains authoritative.

No privacy-excluded historical item was restored during EI-3. Associated DELETE-only media remains production-ineligible under docs/media-manifest.yml.

Media validation

• Production media root remains images/.
• Media manifest records 139 production assets.
• Google Drive remains archival/master storage.
• No drive.google.com production hotlinks were found in repository search.
• wp-content search results are not evidence of a surviving paco.org WordPress media dependency: current matches include documentation and an external UCLA research URL. EI-2 media governance remains authoritative.

Information architecture validation

EI-3.6 established the production discovery model:

• Writing is the authored-content hub.
• PTIR is a separate publication.
• The Loudmouth is a historical collection.
• Featured is an editorial promotion state.
• History is curated discovery, not chronology.
• /categories/ is retained as the compatibility URL for canonical Subjects.
• /blog/ is a compatibility redirect to Writing.
• Journalism & Media has a canonical portfolio page.
• Archive distinguishes published chronology from the 72-record legacy archive boundary.

Build validation

The GitHub Pages build for the EI-3.6 production head 63127ebba9acdac201c5658645e51cf1f1a1d0dd completed successfully before EI-3.7 cleanup. EI-3.7 cleanup consists of content removals and documentation; the final closeout commit should trigger a fresh Pages build.

EI-3 result

EI-3 converted EI-1 decisions into an operational editorial architecture:

1. EI-3.1 — Retained Corpus Mapping
2. EI-3.2 — Taxonomy & Content Model
3. EI-3.3 — PUBLISH Migration
4. EI-3.4 — REWRITE & Flagship Promotion
5. EI-3.5 — Archive Representation
6. EI-3.6 — Navigation & Discoverability
7. EI-3.7 — Editorial Validation & Series Closeout

EI-3 is complete.

The next modernization series should move beyond historical editorial implementation and address current-site consistency and publishing operations: metadata normalization across post-EI-1 current content, PTIR production metadata, redirects/legacy URLs, automated editorial validation, and ongoing governance.