EI-5.6 — Editorial Presentation & Provenance

Status: COMPLETE
Date: 2026-08-08

Objective

Standardize reader-facing presentation of publication history, revised historical material, subjects, and contextual navigation after the EI-5 editorial review and Featured calibration.

Changes

Reader-facing provenance

The post layout now derives publication context from front matter rather than displaying the generic Written on footer for every article.

• Current writing displays Published <date> plus the canonical subject when available.
• Historical writing displays Originally published <original_date>.
• Substantively revised historical writing also displays Revised <revised_date>.
• If an older historical collection item does not carry a separate original_date, the historical post date remains the authoritative publication date.

This preserves historical dates while making revision provenance visible without replacing the original chronology.

Contextual navigation

EI-5.4 introduced curated related relationships. EI-5.6 removes the remaining category-generated related-reading fallback from the post layout.

The resulting rule is:

1. render curated related items when explicitly defined;
2. otherwise, if a canonical subject exists, offer the subject browse path;
3. do not fabricate related reading from legacy WordPress/Jekyll categories.

This also removes the dormant slugize typo from the legacy fallback code path.

Quality-gate expansion

scripts/editorial_quality_gate.py now validates:

• revised historical content carries both historical: true and original_date;
• Featured content has an integer importance from 1 through 5;
• the invalid slugize filter is not reintroduced;
• legacy category-generated related-reading logic is not restored.

The initial version of the provenance check was intentionally tested against production and exposed an over-broad assumption: The Loudmouth collection items correctly preserve authoritative historical dates without needing a redundant original_date. The gate was refined so the stronger original_date requirement applies when revised_date is present.

Validation

The Editorial Quality Gates workflow for commit b7ec8094c8869ce8618ad3fd88cac3be955fda90 completed successfully.

The GitHub Pages Jekyll build for the same commit also completed successfully. Deployment followed through the normal Pages workflow.

Constraints preserved

• No article body was rewritten.
• No historical publication date or stable permalink was changed.
• The Loudmouth remains a collection with preserved dates rather than being forced into rewrite-style provenance metadata.
• No DELETE/privacy material was restored, referenced, or used for contextual linking.
• PTIR remains governed as a separate briefing series.

Result

EI-5.6 closes the presentation layer around the editorial model established in EI-3 through EI-5. Historical provenance is explicit, Featured prominence is validated, and legacy category semantics no longer drive post-to-post discovery.

Next sprint: EI-5.7 — Editorial Validation & Series Closeout.