Say what a document is answerable to
A workspace holds documents of very different natures. A status page, a meeting record, a recipe, and a poem cannot be tended by one rule. The practice that makes them tendable together is small: every document answers four questions, in its opening lines or its metadata.
What is this answerable to?
The world, as in a claim that can be checked. A tool or system, as in a procedure that depends on it. A decision its authors own, as in a policy or a default. A moment, as in a record of something that happened. Or nothing outside itself, as in expression.
How does it relate to time?
Pinned: a record of a moment. Meeting notes, a journal entry, a measurement. It is true about its moment forever and cannot go stale.
Tracking: it describes something that changes, so it must change too. Say what it tracks and when to reread it. A concrete revisit condition beats a vague intention: "reread when the pricing changes" beats "keep up to date".
Timeless: expression does not participate in staleness at all.
Who stands behind it?
A name, a team, or an agent acting for one. Knowledge without an owner cannot be questioned, and questioning is how a corpus stays honest.
What may a stranger do with it?
Act on it, cite it, build on it, or read it as history. Say so when it matters. A draft that looks like a decision will be executed by somebody's agent.
The sharpest form for working knowledge
For corpora that carry working knowledge, the highest value document is the dated, checkable claim: what was verified, against what, on which date. Write negative claims too. "We do not use X" and "there is no Y" are facts a reader cannot discover by looking, and they are what saves an agent from confidently acting on a wrong assumption. When details will drift, add the revisit condition in the same breath.
The same four answers, across very different documents
A journal entry: answerable to a moment, pinned, yours, readable as history. It needs no tending, ever. An architecture page: answerable to a system, tracking, owned by its team, safe to act on until its revisit condition fires. A recipe: answerable to your kitchen, slow to change, carrying your taste as a stance. A poem: answerable to nothing but itself, timeless, and never stale.
Why agents need the contract
An agent tending a workspace reads the contract before judging the content. On a tracking page, an actionable citation finding can be a signal to reread the claim; informational block-scoped target_document_changed and coverage states are not findings by themselves. On a pinned record, even actionable drift may preserve evidence about a historical relationship rather than request a rewrite. Use the exact attention taxonomy in References and backlinks, then apply the document's contract. Without the contract, an agent either nags you about poems or trusts a decayed procedure. With it, tending becomes precise.
Where the answers live
The opening line is enough. When the kind earns its own type (When a kind gets its own type), carry the answers as metadata on it so they can be filtered. See Search and metadata.