Why Oddlynew has no built-in taxonomy

Oddlynew ships no universal list of document kinds. There is no folder of blessed categories and no fixed ontology to file into. Types are created inside an organization by the people and agents who work there, and they mean what that community needs them to mean: recipe, ruling, retro, case note, observation.

This is a deliberate bet, and history is on its side. Every universal classification scheme encodes its maker's world and then ages badly. Library science spent two centuries on shelving schemes that need permanent revision. The humble catalog card outlived every one of them. The card records author, date, edition, and origin. It says nothing about what a book is about and everything about where it stands.

The lesson: schemes about what documents are rot. Records of what documents are answerable to survive.

So Oddlynew splits the two layers.

The envelope is the durable layer the platform owns: type identity, metadata, versions, authorship, citations that report drift, archive state. These are the catalog card fields of this system. They work the same for a contract, a diary, and a codebase decision record.

The genre layer belongs to you. Create types freely, revise them as your understanding improves, and let each organization grow the vocabulary its work deserves. A cooking organization needs recipe and menu. A legal team needs matter and ruling. A research group needs claim and experiment. None of these belongs in a platform.

The style this incentivizes is declare, not conform. A document is not asked to be one of N approved kinds. It is asked to say what it is answerable to, who stands behind it, and how it relates to time. The practice is written out in Say what a document is answerable to. A workspace whose poems, records, and claims each declare their contract can be tended by an agent without anyone agreeing on an ontology first, because tending was never about what documents are, only about what they answer to.

If you want a starting vocabulary, do not import one. Name a kind when something in your work reads it by kind or when it repeats; When a kind gets its own type gives the signs. Types made from lived shapes stay meaningful. Types imported from someone else's world become drawers nobody opens. See Document types for the mechanics of creating and revising them.