probes-wiki

An example wiki of robotic space probes — the official demo content repository for Vitrine, which publishes entity-manager repositories as static websites with MarkPub.

This wiki is a demo, not a reference. The information in it is believed to be correct — every record says so itself, with confidence: believed-correct in its frontmatter — but it exists to demonstrate entity-managed publishing, not to serve as a canonical source about space probes. Do not cite it. For the real facts, go to the primary sources in the library: the NASA NSSDCA Master Catalog and the agencies' own mission pages.

What's in it

Typed Markdown records, densely cross-linked, spanning the space age from Luna 3 (1959) to Parker Solar Probe (2018):

Type	Prefix	Where	What
probe	PRB	entities/probe/	16 missions across six decades and five agencies
body	BOD	entities/body/	14 destinations — planets, moons, comets, asteroids, the Sun
instrument	INS	entities/instrument/	8 notable instruments and artifacts
agency	AGY	entities/agency/	5 organizations
person	PER	entities/person/	8 well-documented historical figures
source	SRC	library/sources/	6 authoritative external references

The full inventory is in the entity index. Relations are typed frontmatter fields modeled in both directions (a probe's visited mirrors each body's visited_by; carried mirrors flown_on; people mirrors missions), and every relation is also stated in prose with a validator-checkable reference. uploads/ is reserved — v1 ships no images.

The conventions being demonstrated

• Bare-ID filenames (PRB-007.md); the human title lives in frontmatter title:.
• Frontmatter is the schema-validated contract: id:, entity:, title:, and typed fields (refs, ref lists, enums, dates) declared per type in schemas/, registered by entity-manager.yaml, with schema changes logged in schemas/CHANGELOG.md.
• References in prose carry a validator shadow: [label](../probe/PRB-007.md)^[PRB-007](../probe/PRB-007.md) — ordinary Markdown links a human reads, plus an annotation the engine checks and Vitrine strips at publish time.
• Honesty is part of the schema: every record carries confidence: believed-correct, and precise figures are omitted rather than guessed — a launch date appears only when it is well established, otherwise the year alone.
• .vitrine.yaml selects which frontmatter fields each type displays on its published page.
• .vitrineignore keeps repo-side material off the published site: notes/ is git-tracked working material (record wishlist, fact-checking discipline) that the copy stage skips, so it appears here on GitHub but not on the live demo — the pattern for editorial notes or correspondence that belongs with the content, not on the website. Gitignore syntax; the file itself is never published either.

Building the site

Requires Python 3.12+ with markpub 2.1.2+ and pyyaml (markpub 0.x is unsupported and Vitrine's build refuses it; on Python ≤3.11 pip resolves markpub to the ancient 0.4.5, so use a 3.12+ venv). From a directory containing both this repo and a clone of Vitrine:

git clone https://github.com/markpub/probes-wiki
git clone https://github.com/markpub/vitrine
python3.12 -m venv ~/.venvs/markpub && ~/.venvs/markpub/bin/pip install markpub pyyaml

PYTHON=~/.venvs/markpub/bin/python SITE_TITLE=probes-wiki VITRINE_PAGE_NAMES=slug \
  bash vitrine/build.sh probes-wiki _site

The rendered site lands in _site/, ready for any static host. Vitrine stages a copy and never modifies this repository.

License

Content is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) — see LICENSE. Copyright 2026 Peter Kaminski.

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Content drafted by an AI agent (Claude) under Pete Kaminski's direction; he owns and is responsible for it.