[patterns]

>I picture three docs, A, B, and C which is a summary composite of things pulled from A & B - C will still need its own manual curation and updating if A and B are changed to remain legible, flowing, and meaningful, and I'd rather have a stale doc than a garbled one.

I think I see what you mean. Garbling, as you mention it, is actually what Xanadu is supposed to prevent. The problem is that it is not explicitely mentioned that a document/version (a collection of pointers to immutable content) should also be an addressable entity (an part of the "grand address space") and must not change, once it has been published to the database. In particular, if a link, e.g., a comment, is made to a text appearing in a document/version, the link must, in addition to the content addresses, also contain the address of that document/version (In Fig. 13. [1] that is clearly not the case and I think that's a serious flaw).

This way, everything that document C refers to - and is presented - is at the time it was when the composition was made. How revisions are managed is an orthogonal (and important) problem, but with the scheme above we lose no information about the provenance of a composition and can use that information for more diligent curation.

[1] https://xanadu.com.au/ted/XUsurvey/xuDation.html