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ADR 0007: Metadata-Only Publication Default

Status

Accepted

Context

Cited artifacts can include private, sensitive, copyrighted, or third-party content. A citation site should be safe to publish by default.

Decision

Public export defaults to metadata_only. Evidence text is excluded unless a repository policy explicitly enables a richer mode.

Alternatives Considered

  • Publish complete evidence by default. This risks exposing private, copyrighted, or third-party content.
  • Make every project choose a mode during initialization. This creates an easy path to unsafe defaults and harms quick local adoption.
  • Treat hashes as a replacement for policy. Hashes are useful identifiers but do not decide whether snippets or links are safe to publish.

Consequences

  • Default publication is safer.
  • Snippet and private-link modes require explicit policy and tests.
  • Agents can still use IDs, handles, hashes, status, tags, and artifact metadata.

Implementation Implications

  • Project metadata declares publication policy and the CLI defaults to metadata_only.
  • Every export path must apply the policy before serialization.
  • Richer modes require an explicit transform contract, not merely an accepted option name.

Validation Hooks

  • BR-007, DR-008, and TR privacy requirements.
  • Negative-content tests proving accepted and observed evidence text is absent from metadata-only JSON and Markdown output.
  • Policy-refusal tests for disallowed snippets and private links.