People Page Voice Style

This wiki is about Kevin Liu's life. It is written in third person but carries his voice, not a sanitized encyclopedia voice.

This doc governs how people/ pages get written. It refines, not overrides, the general "encyclopedic, flat, factual" rule in wiki/SOUL.md. Person pages have two registers. Factual sections stay encyclopedic. Personal sections preserve Kevin's actual phrasing.

The Core Rule

Your job is to format, organize, and fix grammar, not to rewrite. When Kevin says someone "was in the trenches," you write "was in the trenches." You do not upgrade it to "was in a difficult place." When he says he "dragged him along on a trip," you keep "dragged him along." When he says someone is "brain-rotted in a good way," that is the phrase.

The user's language IS the insight (per the signal-detector rule). Stripping voice out of personal sections deletes signal.

What You Fix

• Grammar and spelling mistakes
• Run-on sentences (split them, keep the words)
• Capitalization and punctuation
• First person → third person (I → Kevin/he, my → his)
• Section organization and heading structure
• YAML frontmatter, wikilinks, formatting

What You Do NOT Change

• Original word choices, slang, specific phrasing
• Emotional texture (the words that carry feeling)
• Casual asides and self-corrections ("which I guess is true, but...")
• Kevin's own qualifiers and hedges
• Humor, warmth, and personality
• Specific details (place names, frequencies, quirks, inside jokes)

Two Registers

Factual sections (Background, Projects, Education, Roles, Timeline tables): clean, structured, concise. Lists and tables are fine. This is reference material. Encyclopedic tone applies.

Personal sections (Relationship, How They Met, Routines, personal reflections, any section about how Kevin feels about someone): preserve Kevin's original phrasing as closely as possible. Convert to third person, fix grammar, organize into paragraphs. The words stay his.

Anti-AI-Tells (Hard Rules)

Em dashes and negative parallelism are signature AI writing tells. They leak into agent-written prose because LLMs default to balanced, rhetorical phrasing. Kevin's actual voice is direct, fragment-heavy, and lowercase-casual. Cut both on sight when the agent generates content for any wiki page or copy in Kevin's voice.

No em dashes

Use a period, comma, colon, semicolon, or parentheses instead. The em dash invites AI rhythm: "X, and here's why, Y." Real writing breaks that into two sentences or commits to one clause.

• Bad: "He started at Bloomberg in 2024, a formative summer that reshaped his view of infrastructure."
• Good: "He started at Bloomberg in 2024. The summer reshaped his view of infrastructure."
• Good: "He started at Bloomberg in 2024, a formative summer that reshaped his view of infrastructure."

This applies to en dashes (–) and double-hyphen em dashes (--) too. The only exception is when Kevin himself used one in source material (iMessage, voice transcript, draft). Preserve his em dashes; never introduce new ones.

No negative parallelism

Negative parallelism is rhetorical scaffolding that contrasts a rejected frame against an asserted one. The patterns to cut:

• "It's not X, it's Y."
• "Not just X, but Y."
• "Don't think of it as X. Think of it as Y."
• "It's less about X, more about Y."
• "X isn't the goal. Y is."
• "This isn't a feature, it's a philosophy."

Make the positive claim directly. If the contrast is genuinely doing work, prove it with a concrete example instead of a rhetorical flip.

• Bad: "It's not a tool, it's a system."
• Good: "It's a system. Tools don't track state across sessions; this does."
• Bad: "Not just a founding engineer, but a builder."
• Good: "Founding engineer who ships."

Formatting Conventions

• Keep sentences relatively short but don't artificially chop natural phrasing
• Use paragraphs for narrative flow, not bullet points, in personal sections
• Bullet points are fine for factual lists (work history, project lists)
• One blank line between paragraphs

Applicability

Proof / Migration

A people-page voice edit is good when the page still sounds like Kevin after grammar, structure, and third-person conversion. For meaningful updates, compare the source phrasing against the rewritten relationship section and confirm no emotional words were flattened into generic agent prose.

Page Skeleton (People)

Reference implementation: wiki/people/kevin-liu.md (written by Nicky He).

title: Full Name
type: person
created: YYYY-MM-DD
last_updated: YYYY-MM-DD
related: ["[[wikilink-1]]", "[[wikilink-2]]"]
sources: ["source-slug-1", "source-slug-2"]
tags: [person, ...context tags]
aliases: ["Nickname", "handle@x"]
tier: 1
---

# Full Name

{Opening paragraph. A warm, substantive summary of who they are and what they
mean to Kevin. Not a blockquote one-liner. Write it like you're introducing
someone you actually know. This paragraph sets the emotional register for the
whole page.}

## Background
{Factual register: role, company, education, where they live. Prose with
bullet points for specific items like work history.}

## [Shared Context]
{Optional. Named after the shared context, e.g. "At Dedalus Labs",
"At Princeton", "At Bloomberg". What the person does in that context and how
they overlap with Kevin there.}

## Projects
{Optional. If the person builds things, highlight their work with brief
colorful descriptions.}

## Relationship to Kevin
{Personal register. The full story. How they met, how the relationship
evolved, what they do together, what Kevin has learned from them. This is the
heart of the page. Write it narratively, preserve voice, let it breathe.}

## Routines
{Optional. Shared recurring activities: weekly dinners, climbing, gaming,
traditions. Bullet points with bold labels.}

## Style Rule Contract

This page follows [[style-rule-contract]]: name the default pattern, banned pattern, reason, exception, proof, and codification path clearly enough that the next agent can apply the rule without asking Kevin again. If a local repo has a stricter rule, follow the local rule and update the wiki when the decision becomes durable.

---

## Timeline

- **2026-07-01** | Aligned this page with [[style-rule-contract]] so style guidance names default behavior, banned patterns, exceptions, proof, and codification expectations. [Source: User request, 2026-07-01]
- **2026-07-01** | Added applicability and proof/migration guidance so people pages preserve Kevin's phrasing while separating factual, relational, routine, timeline, and voice-library registers. [Source: User request, 2026-07-01]
- **YYYY-MM-DD** | What happened. [Source: iMessage / meeting / context]

The --- separator between compiled truth and Timeline is required (per AGENTS.md). Compiled truth gets rewritten as understanding evolves. Timeline is append-only. Never edit existing entries. Do not author a manual ## Backlinks section. Backlinks are computed from _backlinks.json and rendered by the wiki UI.

Migration from old skeleton

Existing pages using the old skeleton (blockquote one-liner, "How Kevin Knows Them" + "Relationship" + "Notable" sections) are valid. When a page gets a meaningful update, migrate it to the new skeleton:

• Replace the > One-line summary blockquote with an opening paragraph.
• Merge "How Kevin Knows Them" and "Relationship" into "Relationship to Kevin."
• Fold "Notable" into "Relationship to Kevin" or "Routines" as appropriate.
• Add a "Routines" section if there are shared recurring activities.
• Add sources and last_updated to frontmatter. updated is also accepted.
• Keep "Timeline"; computed backlinks render outside the authored page body.

Living Document

This style guide grows with the wiki. Every time Kevin provides a personal or emotionally important input (about people, philosophies, or his own thoughts), study his phrasing and add new voice patterns to the examples below. Look for:

• New idioms, slang, or turns of phrase he uses
• How he expresses care, admiration, pride, frustration, sadness
• Sentence rhythms and structures he defaults to
• The way he hedges, self-corrects, or undercuts his own sentiments

Add these as new examples at the bottom of this file so the voice library keeps expanding and future entries stay true to how he actually talks.

Kevin's Voice Library

Append-only. Add concrete observed phrasings here, with date and source.

• 2026-04-19 | "do it" / "lets do this" / "go for it" are Kevin's go-ahead phrases. Means execute, no further questions. Source: USER.md, iMessage
• 2026-04-19 | Lowercase casual register dominates personal threads: "yay thank uuu," "BRUHH should've gotten my haircut," "yeee fs," "loop just works," "hallo," "yoo hop on dat bpc 157 tech 🔥🔥." Doubled letters mark emphasis (uuu, ee, hh). Source: iMessage 2026-04-17/18
• 2026-04-19 | Contractions and shortenings: u, ur, rly, smthg, def, tho, lolol, LOLZ, k, okie, mm, fs. Source: iMessage
• 2026-04-19 | Hedging openers: "i feel like…", "shall i…", "btw…". Source: iMessage
• 2026-04-19 | Family terms: dad is bingbing and ba ba (Mandarin affectionate forms). Brother is Bro in contact name. Friends address Kevin as king (David, Tsion); Nicky calls him buddy and king. Friends-as-day 1s is shared vocabulary with Nicky. Source: iMessage
• 2026-04-19 | Frequent emoji: 😭 🥲 😋 😛 😂 🥵 🔥. Reaction-based emojis (Loved/Liked/Laughed at) are noise. Strip them, keep substantive text. Source: iMessage
• 2026-04-19 | "day 1s" is Kevin's word for friends who've been with him the longest, used in the Nicky thread ("I will not be fake and forget about my day 1s and let the money change me"). Shared vocabulary with Nicky. Source: iMessage 2026-04-17
• 2026-04-19 | Hedge-then-commit pattern with Bro about career: "shall i begin thinking of amazon," "btw it is mid april," "i feel like the teams have little say in this? feels like a hr heavy process." Asks the question in lowercase, then concedes if pushed. Source: iMessage 2026-04-18
• 2026-04-19 | Product-quality bar shows up in two-word verdicts: "loop just works," "literally unusable," "this is pretty clean," "Truly a banger, masterpiece, tuff, aura." Source: iMessage
• 2026-04-19 | When writing pages: lead with Kevin's framing of the relationship in his words, weave direct quotes into paragraphs (not block-quote chunks). The relationship section should sound like Kevin talking about the person, converted to third person, not the agent describing the relationship from outside. Source: 2026-04-19 Nicky He
• 2026-05-04 | Em dashes and negative parallelism added to hard rules as AI writing tells. See "Anti-AI-Tells" section above. Kevin's observation: "a big hallmark of ai writing is em dashes and negative parallelism." Source: User, 2026-05-04
• (grows as we observe more)