Entry Schema — The Six Fields

Capture

Every entry on YY's World has exactly six fields. The schema is the same for every entry, every domain, every topic.

DECISION:   What was chosen.
WHY:        The reasoning behind the choice.
WHY-NOT:    What was seriously considered and rejected, and why.
BREAKS IF:  The conditions under which this decision stops being right.
EXPIRES:    When this entry's reasoning becomes stale.
YY'S TAKE:  What the squirrel thought about it.

All six fields appear in every entry. None are optional.

Why

The schema serves two audiences simultaneously.

For a kid reading the entry: the schema is a pattern that repeats until it becomes reflex. DECISION is not interesting alone. WHY is not interesting alone. WHY-NOT is where the real reasoning lives — the shadow of what was rejected. BREAKS IF makes the decision human-scale rather than universal. EXPIRES teaches that reasoning has a shelf life. YY'S TAKE is where the session becomes irreducible — no one else has YY's take.

For an AI reading the site as a lens: the schema provides a queryable structure. An AI can extract: every decision made, every alternative rejected, every constraint on every decision, every expiry condition, every documented squirrel objection. Without a fixed schema, the site is narrative. With the schema, it is a structured knowledge artifact that can be parsed, compared, cross-referenced, and used to reason about patterns across entries.

The WHY-NOT field is the most important and most often skipped in natural documentation. It carries the "negative space" that the YY Method treats as load-bearing. A decision without its rejected alternatives is half a record. The schema enforces completeness.

Why-Not

Why not flexible structure per entry type? Different topics might seem to warrant different formats — a practice session entry differs from a friendship decision entry. But flexible structure means the AI cannot reliably parse the artifact. The schema's uniformity is what makes the site machine-readable as a lens. Topic variation is handled inside the fields, not by varying the fields.

Why not prose-only entries without explicit field labels? Prose is harder to parse and easier to smooth. Field labels force the author to fill each slot explicitly — you cannot accidentally skip WHY-NOT in prose-free form because the field is absent. The labels also train the kid reader: after enough entries, they begin to mentally label everything they encounter.

Why not five fields, dropping YY'S TAKE? YY'S TAKE is the authentication field. It is where the entry proves it came from a specific session with a specific squirrel. It is non-optional precisely because it is the field most tempting to skip — YY doesn't always have a take. When YY has no take, the field says so. That is also information.

Why not add more fields (e.g., CONFIDENCE, ALTERNATIVES CONSIDERED)? Six is the right count for a kids' site. More fields create cognitive overhead for the reader and authoring friction for the operator. WHY-NOT already covers alternatives considered. BREAKS IF already implies confidence (high confidence = narrow BREAKS IF conditions; low confidence = broad ones).

Breaks If

A field is published as optional or absent. Field names drift across entries. The schema is modified without filing a correction ADR. YY'S TAKE is dropped from entries because "YY didn't have a take this time" — the correct response is to write that YY had no objection and note why that itself is unusual.

Tribal Context

Operator supplied: The six-field structure, derived from the YY Method's core loop (Capture, Why, Why-Not, Commit, Timestamp) adapted for entry-level content.

Session supplied: The framing of YY'S TAKE as the authentication field and WHY-NOT as the most load-bearing field.

Commit

Decision: Six fields. All required. Schema inviolable. DECISION → WHY → WHY-NOT → BREAKS IF → EXPIRES → YY'S TAKE.

Confidence: High.