EI-5.7 — Editorial Validation & Series Closeout

Status: COMPLETE
Date: 2026-08-08

Scope

EI-5.7 validates the editorial-development work completed after the historical migration and closes EI-5 — Editorial Development & Flagship Content.

The governing principle remains: Preserve what is worth remembering. Curate everything else.

Series reconciliation

EI-5.1 — Rewrite Queue Reconciliation

Confirmed that EI-3.4 had already resolved all 15 EI-1 REWRITE classifications. EI-5 therefore became a second-pass editorial-development series rather than a duplicate migration rewrite.

EI-5.2 — Flagship Editorial Review

Reviewed the four highest-priority historical pieces:

• A programmer, again
• The Age of Marvels
• Twenty-thirteen
• Why IT support is hated

All four were judged strong enough to retain without another prose rewrite.

EI-5.3 — Secondary Editorial Review

Reviewed:

• The Intercom
• Random videos from the 1980s
• Narcopapa (2005)
• Journalism & Media Portfolio

No speculative rewriting or media reconstruction was justified. Artifact enrichment remains evidence-driven and subject to EI-2 media governance.

EI-5.4 — Contextual Linking

Added explicit curated related relationships among retained historical/technology pieces. Contextual links explain why a reader may continue to another piece rather than relying on generic category matching.

EI-5.5 — Featured Corpus Calibration

Calibrated Featured as a scarce editorial front door.

Final authored Featured corpus:

• [5] Show your work, even when it hurts — Teaching
• [5] The Age of Marvels — Computing History
• [5] A programmer, again — Technology
• [4] Twenty-thirteen — Computing History
• [4] Why IT support is hated — Technology

The Intercom and the Journalism & Media Portfolio remain valuable and discoverable but are no longer Featured. Random videos from the 1980s and Narcopapa (2005) remain intentionally non-Featured.

EI-5.6 — Editorial Presentation & Provenance

Standardized reader-facing post metadata:

• current writing: publication date + subject;
• historical writing: original publication date;
• substantively revised historical writing: original publication date + revision date;
• curated related links when supplied;
• canonical subject navigation when no curated relationship is supplied.

The final legacy category-generated related-reading fallback was removed.

Validation findings

Editorial quality gate

The expanded gate validates:

• canonical subjects and content types;
• PTIR publication metadata;
• protected compatibility routes;
• retired Blog pagination state;
• revised historical provenance metadata;
• Featured importance values;
• absence of the invalid slugize Liquid filter;
• absence of category-generated related-reading logic.

The first provenance rule exposed an over-broad assumption about The Loudmouth collection: preserved collection items use their historical post dates directly and do not need redundant original_date values. The rule was corrected to require original_date when a historical item carries revised_date.

The Editorial Quality Gates workflow subsequently completed successfully on the corrected implementation and again on the EI-5.6 documentation head.

Build validation

The GitHub Pages Jekyll build completed successfully after the EI-5.6 presentation implementation. The series-closeout documentation commit triggers the normal final Pages and editorial-quality workflows.

Privacy validation

EI-5 did not reopen EI-1 classifications. DELETE material remains excluded. The 90 privacy-excluded Ben/Sophie historical records remain DELETE material and were not used for rewriting, contextual links, Featured selection, portfolio evidence, or media recovery.

Media validation

EI-5 restored no speculative media. Google Drive remains archival/master storage and GitHub remains the production-media repository. Missing historical artifacts are not reconstructed merely to make retained pages appear richer.

URL/provenance validation

• Existing historical publication dates remain authoritative.
• Stable explicit permalinks remain unchanged.
• Revision dates supplement rather than replace original chronology.
• PTIR and The Loudmouth remain separate publication/collection structures rather than being absorbed into Featured authored Writing.

EI-5 result

EI-5 shifted paco.org from a technically migrated retained corpus to an editorially curated one:

1. no duplicate rewrite work;
2. flagship pieces reviewed rather than endlessly polished;
3. secondary historical material preserved without inflation;
4. deliberate contextual relationships added;
5. Featured recalibrated around the site’s current identity;
6. historical provenance standardized in the presentation layer;
7. quality gates extended to protect those decisions.

EI-5 is complete.

Recommended next direction

The next modernization series should move beyond historical remediation and editorial infrastructure. The strongest next focus is current-site experience and content growth: visual hierarchy, responsive presentation, accessibility, portfolio evidence when verified, search/discovery refinement, and a sustainable pipeline for new authored Writing and PTIR without reopening already-settled historical decisions.