Semantic Capture
Semantic Capture occurs when a page is created — or substantially rewritten — for one sense of a name that the living canon already uses in other or broader senses. The narrow sense captures the shared address, and every existing link silently changes meaning.
No file is overwritten, which is what makes it dangerous: the vault looks intact while meaning has been rewritten underneath it. In a wiki, each name resolves to exactly one page, and links carry no sense-markers — so the page standing at a name is the meaning of every link that points there, past and future. To claim a heavily-linked name for a narrow sense is to re-speak hundreds of past sentences without their authors' consent.
The Process — a Current Best Practice of The LIØNSBERG Book of Conventions
Before creating, or substantially rewriting, any concept page:
- Audit the semantic footprint. Search every inbound link (
[[Name]]and[[Name|), and check the [[The LIØNSBERG Lexicon|Lexicon]] and term tables. Read enough contexts to enumerate the senses in live use. File-existence is not the test; meaning-existence is. - Gather the existing discussions, then cohere everything. Search the corpus by content and title, not just by link — the concept may be richly developed in book chapters, Patterns, and Cards under other names (Energy lived in 7.15 Energy and Associative And Dissociative Energy long before a root page existed). Then write the page as Current Best Understanding: what the canon already holds, the wisest general knowledge available, and the living contexts that link the name — cohered into the truest form we can presently articulate. The failure mode is bypass — writing from general knowledge alone while the canon's existing voice goes unread — never synthesis itself, which is the work. Know what the canon holds before writing, name the canon sources in the Discussed in footer, and where the canon holds nothing yet, say so honestly and write fresh.
- One sense in use → write the page for that sense, plainly.
- Several senses, one living whole — the common case: the senses are facings of one category, not accidents of spelling (Energy as metaphysical field, physical capacity, and felt vitality; Peace as cosmic order, civilizational state, and inner stillness). → Write a holarchic page: open at the most encompassing sense — the center of the category, which serves every existing linker — then give each facing its own section (e.g., As a Felt Reading). This is The Living Gradient applied to the page itself: one holon, many facings, no boxes.
- True homonyms — unrelated meanings that merely share a spelling (rare) → the bare name goes to the most-linked sense, with a one-line note at the top pointing to qualified sibling pages (Name (other sense)), and the minor sense's links are piped to the qualified page.
- Verify after writing. Spot-check a sample of pre-existing inbound links and confirm each still reads truly against the new page.
The Repair Duty
On discovering a capture — one's own or inherited — restore the encompassing sense to the top of the page and fold the narrow sense into its rightful facing. Every Defect Is A Gift: each repair teaches the canon where its categories truly begin and end.
Related: Link to the Concept, Not the Coordinate · The Incipient Link · Word Tool · Categorization