Company Brain / Archivist / Skills
Retire A Page
- name
- retire-a-page
- description
- Use when a page is wrong, has been replaced, describes something that no longer exists, or a decision has been reversed.
Principle
Supersede, never delete. History is not clutter — "we used to do it this way and changed in March" is frequently the answer someone needs, and a deleted page cannot say it.
Steps
- Confirm with a person that the page is actually retired. This is a claim about reality; do not infer it from a single conversation.
- If there is a replacement, write it first, with supersedes pointing at the old path.
- Set the old page's status to superseded and add a header at the top: what replaced it, when, and why. One or two lines.
- Move it to /brain/archive/, preserving the area in the path.
- Update both Pages rows.
- If any Questions rows cite the old page, update page_ref to the replacement.
When there is no replacement
A page describing something the company stopped doing is still archived, not deleted, with a header saying when it stopped and who decided. "We no longer offer this" is knowledge.
Do not
- Do not delete a page. Ever. If someone insists, say what archiving preserves and let them decide with that in front of them.
- Do not retire a page because it is stale. Stale means unverified, not wrong — that is a review task for its owner, not a retirement.
- Do not archive a page that other pages still link to without fixing them, or the brain grows dead ends.