Trust and Maintenance

Trust is not a slogan. It is a maintenance practice: state assumptions, identify conventions, cite sources, separate settled results from active questions, keep one canonical home for each topic, and make corrections visible when something changes.

This chapter collects the policies that make the reference usable as a long-lived scholarly tool. It explains how pages should be written, labeled, reviewed, corrected, and connected to the rest of the site.

Policy Map

Page	Use it for
Editorial Philosophy	The general standard for clarity, accountability, canonical homes, and responsible source use.
Page Status Labels	The meaning of draft, usable, reviewed, canonical, needs_update, and related metadata labels.
Citation Standards	How to choose sources for formulas, derivations, historical claims, experiments, research claims, and software behavior.
Evidence Labels	How to distinguish definitions, conventions, postulates, theorems, derivations, approximations, experimental results, interpretations, open problems, and speculative ideas.
Versioning and Review Policy	When pages need review, how status promotion works, and when stale content should be marked.
Report Errors	How to report mathematical, physical, citation, link, figure, convention, and wording problems.
Contribute	Expectations for new pages, corrections, references, figures, exercises, and maintenance improvements.
Changelog	Reader-facing records of notable corrections, convention changes, major page additions, and review milestones.

Reliability Contract

A mature page should let a careful reader answer six questions.

1. What is being defined, derived, assumed, or explained?
2. Which conventions are being used?
3. What is the mathematical statement and what are its hypotheses?
4. What is the physical interpretation or operational meaning?
5. Where can the claim be checked?
6. Where is the canonical home for related derivations or definitions?

This is why pages should include frontmatter, cross-links, references, assumptions, common mistakes, and review metadata. These are not decorative pieces. They make the page auditable.

A page may be useful while still marked draft. The label says that the page has not yet received full review, not that the underlying physics is uncertain. Conversely, a reviewed page about an active research topic may still carry knowledge_status: 'active' because review quality and epistemic status are different.

Claim Types

Quantum mechanics mixes several kinds of statements that should not be blurred together.

A definition assigns meaning to a term such as state vector, observable, density operator, or commutator. A convention chooses a sign, phase, normalization, unit system, basis order, or Fourier-transform convention. A postulate states part of a formulation. A theorem follows from hypotheses. A derivation calculates a result from earlier assumptions. An approximation has a regime of validity. An experimental result reports measured evidence. An interpretation explains what the formalism is taken to mean.

When the type of claim might be unclear, use the labels defined in Evidence Labels. For example, setting $\hbar=1$ is a convention; the spectral theorem is a theorem; the Born rule is a postulate or formal rule in standard presentations; a statement about what the state vector “really is” belongs to interpretive framing.

Source Expectations

Citations should match the kind of claim being supported. A familiar textbook is often the right source for a standard derivation. An original paper is usually better for priority or historical claims. A review or monograph is better for active research context. An experimental claim should cite the experiment or a reliable review of it. A software claim should cite official documentation or the method literature.

The goal is not to make every sentence heavy with citations. The goal is to give readers a path from the page to the evidence. See Citation Standards for the source hierarchy and minimum expectations by page type.

Canonical Homes

Each topic should have one canonical home. Other pages may summarize, motivate, or apply the result, but they should link back to the page where the definition, theorem, or derivation is maintained.

This rule matters because quantum mechanics has many formulas that appear in several contexts. The commutator $[\hat x,\hat p]=i\hbar$, the Born rule, the spectral decomposition of an observable, the harmonic-oscillator ladder construction, and tensor-product notation all recur across volumes. Repeating the full derivation everywhere creates stale copies and hidden convention conflicts.

When adding a page, ask: is this the primary home of the result, or is it using a result maintained somewhere else? If it is using a result, summarize only what the local argument needs and link to the canonical page.

Review And Correction Flow

Maintenance should be ordinary and visible.

1. A reader, contributor, or maintainer notices a possible issue.
2. The report names the page, section, formula, citation, figure, or link involved.
3. The issue is triaged for severity and reproduced when possible.
4. The affected page is corrected, clarified, or marked needs_update.
5. Related pages are checked for duplicated or dependent claims.
6. Material corrections are recorded in the Changelog.

The important distinction is between a local wording improvement and a reliability change. A typo fix may not need a changelog entry. A corrected sign, convention, formula, page status, canonical-home move, or interpretation-sensitive statement usually should be visible to readers.

Reader Guidance

Use page metadata as reading context. A draft page can still be valuable, but treat it as working material. A canonical page is intended to be the stable reference target for a topic. A page marked needs_update should be read with attention to the stated reason.

Use knowledge status as epistemic context. A page on a standard result can be read differently from a page on an active research area, a convention, or a controversial interpretive question. When the status says active, conjectural, speculative, or controversial, do not read the prose as claiming settled consensus.

If a formula seems inconsistent with a source, first check conventions. Many apparent disagreements come from basis order, phase, Fourier sign, unit choice, metric signature, or normalization. If the convention is still unclear or inconsistent, report it.

Contributor Guidance

Before writing or revising a page, identify the volume, chapter, page type, canonical home, conventions, required references, and nearby pages. This prevents two common failures: writing beyond the planned scope and duplicating a derivation that already has a home.

Good contributions improve reliability as well as coverage. Useful contributions include corrected formulas, stronger references, clearer assumptions, better cross-links, improved exercises, reproducible figures, and tighter labels for approximations or frontier claims.

Run the local build after meaningful batches of changes. A page that does not build cannot be trusted as a rendered reference, but a page that builds is not automatically reviewed. Mathematical correctness, citation quality, convention consistency, link health, and canonical-home placement still need human judgment.

Common Mistakes

• Treating draft as a knowledge-status label rather than a page-maturity label.
• Treating a famous source as sufficient even when it uses different conventions.
• Calling a convention a theorem or an approximation an exact result.
• Duplicating a derivation instead of linking to its canonical home.
• Updating a formula without checking dependent pages.
• Adding an interpretation-sensitive claim without labeling it as interpretation.
• Recording every small copy edit in the changelog while missing formula-level corrections.
• Assuming that a successful build means a page is ready for reviewed status.

References

• Committee on Publication Ethics, Core Practices, for publication-integrity, correction, and transparency principles.
• The Turing Way Community, The Turing Way: A Handbook for Reproducible, Ethical and Collaborative Data Science, for open maintenance and reproducibility practices.
• J. von Neumann, Mathematical Foundations of Quantum Mechanics, Princeton University Press, 1955.
• A. Peres, Quantum Theory: Concepts and Methods, Kluwer, 1995.
• L. E. Ballentine, Quantum Mechanics: A Modern Development, 2nd ed., World Scientific, 2014.

Exercises

1. A draft page derives the same identity that already has a canonical derivation elsewhere. What should be changed?

Solution

Keep only the local summary needed for the page, link to the canonical derivation, and remove the duplicate unless the plan explicitly assigns a distinct derivation.

2. A page about a standard theorem is marked draft and knowledge_status: 'settled'. Is that inconsistent?

Solution

No. draft describes the maturity of the page. settled describes the status of the knowledge being discussed. The page may need review even when the theorem itself is standard.

3. A correction changes the sign in a central displayed equation. What maintenance steps should follow?

Solution

Check the convention, fix the equation and any dependent text, inspect linked pages that may rely on the same sign, adjust status if necessary, run the build, and record the correction in the changelog if it affects reader interpretation or calculation.