Frontmatter

Think of it like the Label on a Filing Cabinet Drawer

Every wiki page starts with a block of text between two --- lines. That's the frontmatter — YAML data that describes the page without being part of the explanation.

---
title: TransJakarta Busway
tags: [transport, jakarta, public-transit]
source: "https://example.com/jakarta-transport-guide"
created: 2026-07-07
updated: 2026-07-07
status: active
aliases: [busway, transjakarta, TJ]
---

This is the label on the filing cabinet. It tells you:

Field	What it means	Why it matters
title	The human-readable name	Used for [[wikilinks]] resolution
tags	Categories	For grouping and finding related pages
source	Where this knowledge came from	Chain of custody — you can verify the original
created	When the page was born	Helps track knowledge evolution
updated	Last modification date	Lint uses this to flag stale pages (>90d)
status	draft / active / stale	Trust level at a glance
aliases	Other names for the same concept	Makes [[wikilinks]] match more flexibly

The Lifecycle

draft ──→ active ──→ stale (if not touched >90d)
  ↑                       │
  └── re-ingest —─────────┘

• draft — just created from an ingest, not reviewed yet
• active — you've read it, it feels correct
• stale — last updated >90 days ago. Source might still be valid, but needs a look

What If There's No Frontmatter?

The lint script will flag it. Without frontmatter: - The page has no title (script uses the filename as fallback) - No tags → harder to find in search (tags give 5x keyword score) - No source → can't trace where the info came from - No date → can't tell if it's trustworthy or ancient

Remember: Frontmatter is the invisible scaffolding. Readers see the explanation. The metadata makes the wiki usable at scale.