[shalomormsby]

Why

On 2026-10-17, four wiki pages quoted Tao Te Ching chapter 1 in a wording the translation had dropped the day before, and one still quoted a 1972 translation's "the eternal Tao". The wiki is ambient context in every opencosmos session and feeds Cosmo's retrieval, yet nothing compared it against the text it quotes. This is layer 2 of the sync plan. Layer 1, retractions.yaml, is in taoteching#39.

What it checks

scripts/knowledge/living-quotes.ts:

• Finds every quotation attributed to a living text, a source that is still being revised. The Open Tao Te Ching is the only one for now, and I Ching can join the registry with one line.
• Accepted citation forms: (*Tao Te Ching*, Chapter 42), (*Tao Te Ching*, ch. 1), (*Tao Te Ching*, chs. 23, 16).
• Requires each segment of a quotation (split at / and ellipses) to appear in that chapter's verse in sources/taoism-tao-te-ching.md, ignoring case and punctuation. It never reads the notes, which quote rejected wordings on purpose.
• Rejects a bare (ch. N) / (Chapter N) on a line about the Tao. It can't be tied to a book, and on a page that quotes several books, a guess would be wrong.

Where it runs

• checks.yml, on every PR: the 10 tests (npm run test:living-quotes), then the check itself (npm run quotes:living).
• The daily Tao Te Ching sync, right after regenerating. If a revision leaves a quotation behind, the new text still ships, because holding back the translation for a stale quote would be backwards. But the run fails red, and one issue lists the quotations to re-quote, commenting on the issue if it's already open. The sync pushes with GITHUB_TOKEN, which doesn't trigger checks.yml, so without this step nothing would check the new text.
• /knowledge-compile now says how to quote a living text. /knowledge-review runs the check as Check 0.

What it found

• Six citations were bare, so they had never been checked. They now name the work. Two of them, impermanence.md's quotes from chapters 16 and 2, had escaped every check until now.
• All 10 quotations match the current text. Each wiki edit is logged in wiki/log.md.
• A bug of mine, caught in development: the first version matched "ch." but not a capitalised "Chapter", so it reported OK on 4 quotations when there were 10. A test now pins that case.

Checks

test:living-quotes 10/10 · quotes:living OK · quotes:lint OK · health ("All inline links resolve correctly") · both workflow files parse.

🤓 + 🤖 Created by Shalom with the assistance of Claude Code