Archival Standard: Full-Text Preservation

Type: Developer Guidance — Standing Archival Policy Status: MANDATORY — established by creator, applies to all past and future processing

The Core Principle

✅ This archive is the SOLE permanent record of the Maf source material. No other copy of the original ChatGPT conversations, Medium articles, or other source content will exist once this project concludes — with the sole exceptions of the starnations master index (mafstarfleetbattles.blogspot.com, indexed via modernmarketing1.wixsite.com/mafgame/starnations) and the Medium articles themselves, both of which remain externally hosted and accessible on their own.

Everything else — every treaty, every constitutional article, every skit, every poem, every planet/city/starnation description, every in-universe document generated across every processed conversation — exists ONLY in this archive going forward. If it is not captured here in full, it is lost permanently. This archive will serve as the source material for developers, gameplay, and future DLCs.

What This Means in Practice

When a source conversation generates an actual document or creative artifact — not just discusses or describes one — that artifact's full text must be preserved as its own archive entry, even for material flagged as "not currently active canon" (future dev arcs, template/example content, etc.) — since even shelved material may be the only surviving copy of that creative work.

Summarizing what a document says is NOT the same as archiving it. A summary loses the actual wording, structure, and voice — which for creative writing is often the entire point of the material.

Fog of History: Never Overwrite, Always Add

✅ Standing principle, established by creator: When new source material provides information that differs from what's already documented on a page — different figures, different accounts, different dates, different characterizations of the same event — do not overwrite the existing content. Add the new version alongside it, clearly attributed to its own source.

This reflects an in-universe framing: differences between sources can represent genuine "fog of history" — different eyewitness perspectives, different historians' accounts, deliberately unreliable or biased narrators (especially in-game characters/NPCs with their own agendas), or simply different dates/details remembered differently by different tellers. This is treated as a feature of the archive, not noise to be resolved — multiple accounts of the same event are worldbuilding material in their own right, not just an accuracy problem to fix.

In practice:

When updating an existing page with new source material, preserve the prior version's content in full; append the new version as an additional account/perspective, with clear sourcing for each.
Only replace prior content outright when the creator explicitly confirms one account supersedes another (e.g., correcting a genuine AI hallucination/error the creator has flagged) — not merely because a new source disagrees.
When in doubt, add rather than overwrite, and note the discrepancy explicitly for the creator's awareness rather than silently picking one version.

Known Gap: Project-Wide Re-Audit In Progress

This standard was established after several rounds of creator checks revealed under-preservation throughout the project — starting with conversation #78 (Constitution documents summarized rather than archived in full), and confirmed as a project-wide pattern going back to the very beginning of conversations-000.json. The creator has directed a full re-audit, starting from the beginning of file 000, re-processing every Maf-relevant conversation to ensure full-text preservation rather than paraphrased summary. This is an active, ongoing, multi-session task — see the open-questions log for progress tracking.

Practical Application Going Forward

Before marking any conversation "fully processed," check specifically for generated documents/artifacts, not just facts and figures
When extracting from a source, pull the actual generated text directly (via the underlying JSON/document), not just what appears in a prior summary of it
If a document went through multiple drafts/revisions in the source conversation, preserve the final, most complete version in full (and note earlier draft differences only if worldbuilding-significant) — or preserve multiple versions in full if they serve different purposes (e.g., formal vs. lore-friendly vs. dramatic register)
This applies equally to "shelved"/future-dev-arc material — full text should still be preserved even if not currently active canon