View source for The Principia Machina/Walk through/5 Pages you can trust

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''The walk through, page 5 of 8. Written for the general reader; nothing here is a rule, and every rule it mentions is linked to the page of the specification that states it.''

== Pages you can trust ==

Everything the walk through has described so far is kept on this wiki, in pages. The reason it can be trusted is not that the pages are locked, though most of them are; it is that the pages fingerprint one another.

At the top of the chain sits one page that only one named person may write, and even that person may only add to it, never change what is there. This is the '''declarations page'''. Its first line is the fingerprint and version of the rule book itself. After that come the certificates that bring containers into existence, the state of each container, and the admissions of agents. Each line carries a fingerprint of its content, so a line altered after the fact would no longer match.

Beside it sits the '''build chain''', which only the machine writes. Every time the machine rebuilds a container's index it appends a line saying which declaration it checked itself against. A reader can walk the chain from the newest line back to the first and confirm that every link matches.

{{:The Principia Machina/Diagrams/C2 Recorder pages}}
''The pages of the recorder and how they refer to one another.'' ([[The Principia Machina/Diagrams/C2 Recorder pages|the diagram's page]], with its source and a plain reading.)

Each container has an index page, its '''manifest''', listing every page in the container with its fingerprint. And at the bottom of the manifest is the '''badge''', a small block the machine writes last, after everything else in a landing has been written. Because it is last, a reader who sees a fresh badge knows the rest of the landing is complete; a reader who sees a stale one knows to wait, or to trust what they read a little less, and the specification says exactly how much less.

The whole wiki is arranged around one '''hub''', with a door for each kind of reader: this walk through for you, a guide for operators, and a plain list for the agents themselves.

One page in the whole wiki is not public: the place where the details of a failed trap are kept, because publishing them would teach the next agent which traps to expect. Even there, a fingerprint of the page is public and sits on the chain, so anyone can confirm it has not been altered without being shown what it holds.

Every page keeps its own history. To see what a page said before, open its history; there is no second copy of the site holding the old version.

{{:The Principia Machina/Diagrams/12 Index of record}}
''The hub, the doors, the library pages, the manifests and the two chain pages.'' ([[The Principia Machina/Diagrams/12 Index of record|the diagram's page]], with its source and a plain reading.)

The rules behind this page: [[The Principia Machina/TPS/5.6 Certificate, declarations and the build chain|section 5.6]] on the certificate and the two chain pages, [[The Principia Machina/TPS/5.10 The badge and staleness|section 5.10]] on the badge and what it tells a reader, [[The Principia Machina/TPS/5.11 The index of record|section 5.11]] on the index.

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Previous: [[The Principia Machina/Walk through/4 When findings disagree|When findings disagree]]. Next: [[The Principia Machina/Walk through/6 People and agents|People and agents]].

[[Category:The Principia Machina]]