the queue is cleared: six rulings

Taken in one sitting against the queue as the ethos pass had populated it.

External citation: prose is not citable, and asking is the mechanism. Superseding the restatement in the entry below it, taken the same day. A registered claim is citable externally carrying its epistemic class, which is what the class is for. Prose is not — not the roadmaps, not the ledgers, not the round reports — whatever label is attached to it. Anyone wanting to cite prose contacts the maintainers.

The reason a label does not suffice: a citation can reproduce ci-only perfectly and still rest on a reading the prose does not support, and the reader of the paper cannot tell. Contact is the only point at which someone can say that passage does not mean what you are taking it to mean. It is a message rather than a review queue, cheap for the asker, and free when nobody asks — which is the property the retired flagship rule lacked.

**RESEARCH_STATE.md is specification layer.** Added to SPEC_PATHS in tests/path_gate.py with a self-test case. A trust-chain edit, recorded as one. It matched no pattern, and an unlisted path defaults to the proof layer, so a governance document was contributor-editable with the gate green. The failure direction is safe: a specification pattern only ever removes write access.

The governance report leaves the root. It is a dated round record and was sitting at the root among living documents, where it read as current: it still named a retired CI job and carried its own competing awaiting the author list. It was moved under prompts/ as a round record, with its four undecided questions carried into the queue above; the entry above supersedes that and removes it entirely.

Two live pointers were repaired rather than left dangling, which is the same failure the deleted setup report nearly caused. projects/normativity/CLAIMS.md carried the file as both dual-register documents of the registered claim simplex.rational-points-sum-to-one; both are repointed, and no claim changed class and no statement of record moved. The identifier inside the settled 2026-08-11 root-cleanup entry is updated in place, per this ledger's header. GOVERNANCE_REPORT.md is removed from the specification enumeration, which prompts/** now covers.

The deference line gets a terms table. projects/deference/notes/TERMS.md, recording current meaning and owning document for the vocabulary that has changed under the mathematics — jurisdiction, the two competence vocabularies, the two registers, conduct as proposal-plus-realization, and the status classes. It is a recording table and not a naming act: every term stays provisional under standard 6, and where it and an owning document disagree the owning document wins. The line's canonical set is five documents rather than four.

The leverage forward tree keeps its name. projects/normativity/forward/ is confirmed. This was the cheapest moment to change it and it is not being changed.

Further leverage frozen trees are registered at the next leverage round, not now. The accepted risk is stated rather than implied: material may drift on the maintainer's machine before it is frozen, in which case what gets registered is a later version than the one the current work was done against.