Freshness

Freshness is the Caper wiki's on-chain extension of verifiability. Facts about a fast-moving ecosystem decay quickly, so a claim sourced correctly a year ago may now be wrong.^[1] A page is not finished when it is correct; it is finished when someone has checked that it is still correct, and recorded the date they checked.

The last-verified stamp

Every article carries a last verified date, set when an editor confirms its facts against current sources and the live ledger. A page whose last verification is more than 180 days old renders a May be outdated notice at the top of the article, asking readers to treat its figures as unconfirmed and inviting a re-check. Where a page has never been verified, its last edit stands in for the stamp, so a page that is merely old is flagged the same way as one that is old and unchecked.

Verification is not a re-read. Stamping a page means the editor went back to the sources: re-probed the routes the citations point at, re-derived the on-chain figures, and confirmed that a mechanism described in the present tense is still one anyone uses. Editing a page does not clear its stamp, so re-stamp after a substantive edit rather than assuming the edit counts.

Prefer a value that re-resolves

The most durable fix for staleness is not to restate a number in prose at all. Where a page states an on-chain value, prefer a derived block (timeline, grants ledger, funding graph) that re-reads it from the ledger on every render,^[2] and where a protocol parameter is configurable, say so and point at where it is read rather than quoting a figure that a later governance vote will silently invalidate. A number frozen into a sentence is a claim with an expiry date; a number resolved at render time does not have one.

The rotating audit

Freshness is maintained by a scheduled maintenance pass rather than by hope. Each run audits one category of the wiki, checks the external links in that subtree, refreshes the pages carrying the oldest verification dates, and records what it did on the wiki maintenance log. Because editing a page moves it to the back of the staleness queue, the rotation guarantees that every category is reached in turn and nothing is permanently neglected. The log is not published.

It is written to a tag path the route table marks private, so it has no public URL – re-probed on 1 September 2026, the page, its markdown twin and its JSON endpoint each return a true HTTP 404 rather than a soft one – and what was checked, what was corrected and what is still outstanding are readable to the maintainers rather than to a reader here. What a reader can see instead is the record each pass leaves on the article itself: the last-verified date shown here, and the updated and last_verified lines in the article's markdown twin.

What the last-verified stamp has produced

The rule above can be checked against the corpus, the way neutral point of view and notability check theirs. The figures below were read from the database on 9 October 2026 across the 281 public articles, by the script that re-derives those pages' censuses at the start of each policy audit. The maintenance log is left out: it sits on a private tag path, and until 11 September it was counted in, which added one article edited every day.

No page has raised the 180-day notice, and none can before 25 December 2026, 180 days after the oldest article was created on 28 June. The oldest edit date in the corpus belongs to Beefy, last edited on 3 September 2026, 36 days before this reading. The median article was edited 17 days ago, and 97 of the 281 within the past week. The notices a reader does see were placed by hand. Three essays, The Exit Right, The Binding Vote and The Personal Caper, have carried an editor's May be outdated block since 28 August 2026, after a governance change superseded the mechanism they argue from; The Founder’s Cut has carried one since 25 September 2026, the day a redeployment removed the trade fee.

84 of the 281 articles carry a stamp, up from 57 on 3 October and 31 on 28 September. For the other 197 the last-edit date stands in, so for 70% of this wiki last verified reports when someone last wrote rather than when someone last checked. A reader cannot tell the two apart: a page with no stamp displays none, and the markdown twin of an unstamped article omits the last_verified line.

No stamp is newer than its page's last edit. 69 of the 84 were written in the same pass as an edit and trail it by under two seconds; the other 15 trail it by between an hour and a half and 53 days, because the page was edited again after it was stamped. The first case follows from how the stamp is written: the script updates the row, and Prisma sets the row's edit date on every update, in the same write as the stamp. Stamping cannot move a page's clock past its last edit.

The freshness check reads the stamp where there is one and the edit date otherwise. An unstamped page resets its clock whenever it is edited, while a stamped page's clock stops until someone stamps it again, however often the page is revised. The oldest clock on the wiki sits on a stamped page for that reason: DAO legal structures, stamped on 10 August 2026, at 59 days. It was edited again on 2 October, and unless it is stamped again it will raise the notice on 6 February 2027. The two pages that held this place on 3 October, AthenaDAO and AxonDAO, have since been re-checked and stamped again, which is the rule working. Beefy, at 36 days, is the oldest clock on a page nobody has reopened.

So stamp a page only after re-checking it, re-stamp it after a substantive edit, and read the date it displays as the last time anyone is known to have checked it, which may be well before its last change.

The five core policies

Five standards govern every article on this wiki, and they are written to be read together: each one answers a question the others do not.

• verifiability – sets the threshold for including material at all.
• no original research – limits what an editor may conclude from it.
• neutral point of view – governs how the material is framed.
• notability – decides whether a subject earns an article of its own.
• freshness – decides how long any of it stands without a re-check.

They apply to articles about Caper and to articles about every other organisation the wiki covers, on the same terms.