Help:Monologue pages

There are a few situations where Talk pages can be filled with what is essentially User page content. This is done as a way to separate "unimportant" pages into several different namespaces instead of putting them all in the User namespace and having unrelated topics all in the same namespace and difficult to separate on the search screen.

9k pages

"9k" pages are prototype or commentary pages in which editors can leave preliminary thoughts on Items. They are not to be taken very seriously in terms of whether they are to be considered "credible", but they are a convenient place for editors to keep apparent thematic connections between Items, reference links, or interesting leads in order to do further research. 9k pages are considered public pages like any other page with its own title, and as such you may read any 9k page, but you usually should not be editing 9k pages that are not under your own full or abbreviated username. (One exception might be if you have created a 9k page for a "team" user which needs to be linked with the corresponding 9k pages for the individual users that belong to that team. This page would be edited by any of the individual users to serve as some kind of overview of their individual pages.)

9k pages are "traditionally" laid out as number lists, but this is not a hard requirement. The subpages of 9k pages in particular can often hold freeform thoughts on a topic or a reading which are intended to be redirected back to the 9k page and worked into it or its main Ontology entry later. Consider a 9k page a scratchpad on which you can put anything vaguely related to creating Ontology entries without it getting lost deep in Ontology page histories.

9k pages are kept in the Ontology talk namespace, under the rationale that their content is similar to the theoretical discussions that would happen on Talk pages for individual Items to work out what each thing is, only perhaps more focused and organized.

Nickels

Nickel pages are catalog records used to describe individual references, or generally archive "sightings in the wild" of particular concepts. The purpose of these pages is make sure that some particular sighting is available in the future even if the original article, video, or other place the sighting may have come from is no longer possible to access. Nickel pages may contain lists of motifs and claims that appeared in the work just as an Item or 9k page about a well-known reference text might, although if you find user commentary on a nickel page this should be moved to a 9k page if possible, as nickel pages are mostly meant to cover what is directly in the reference. (However, it is acceptable to link 9k pages from nickel pages for convenience in order to make the 9k pages easier to find.)

Overall, nickel pages are topics that lie on the bare minimum level of notability; they are not necessarily notable enough to turn into full Ontology entries, but they may be notable enough to include in a References section, or at the very least, they contain motifs or claims that are interesting enough to become Ontology entries.

Nickel pages are kept in the Research talk namespace, under the reasoning that pages about references are effectively preliminary thoughts for book-chapter articles in the Research namespace.

LLM prompts

Within nickels, there may be catalog pages which exist to archive LLM prompts. These pages will contain a question, often paragraphs long, and a section for picking motifs and claims out of the answer. These pages are not allowed to contain any direct quotes from generated text, and instead contain only the manually-written text that happened before and after the generated output.

LLM prompt pages are something of a "containment procedure" for generative AI. They are meant to promote the purposes that make LLMs superficially appealing, such as the concept of going from questions to answers and webpage links, or the concept of probing ontological models of a particular process (for instance, the working model of Trotskyism offered by the LLM at ai.wsws.org), without promoting that these purposes need to be achieved with generated text. The primary purpose of LLM pages is basically to "clean-room engineer" the LLM response so that it starts with manually-written text, has a solution in manually written text, and ends with manually-written text. The secondary purpose is to archive all the links that were either offered with the response or found elsewhere and used to improve it.

LLM prompt pages are not to be taken as direct sources for Ontology entries but more like glorified 9k pages that have not chosen a particular Item to focus on. Their function is otherwise very similar to nickel pages, and as such, they are kept in the Research talk namespace along with nickels.

It should be noted that within "polished" Ontology pages, M3 Items serve a similar role to prompt pages, posing an open-ended question which can be discussed on Talk pages and connected to any number of answers. If you have a narrow enough question to be expressed in a single simple or complex sentence, yet which could have an article's worth of answers, you should consider making an Ontology or 9k page for it.