Public and private knowledge are different editorial objects even when they concern the same subject. A private knowledge system can preserve sensitive context, contradiction, unfinished thought, and associations that are useful only to its owner. A public knowledge base must instead stand alone for readers who do not share that context.
Publication should therefore be a new act of synthesis and declassification rather than a permission bit applied to a private note.
Context and audience
Private notes can use shorthand, unresolved links, remembered conversations, and personal associations as retrieval cues. Those same features can confuse a public reader or disclose information that was never intended as a public claim.
A public page needs its own definition, scope, sources, and hierarchy. It should explain necessary terms locally rather than relying on access to the private graph. Material that cannot be understood without private context is usually not ready to publish.
Declassification
A declassification pass inventories claims and separates externally checkable facts, attributed perspectives, and inference. It removes private names, relationships, health information, correspondence, locations, internal plans, credentials, and mosaic disclosures that emerge only when several harmless-looking details are combined.
Public provenance can retain source URLs, content digests, revision history, and review receipts without exposing the path or neighborhood of the private source note.
Revision and authority
A public knowledge page should remain corrigible. New evidence may revise a claim, change its confidence, split a topic into narrower pages, or archive an obsolete description. The correction history should remain legible rather than pretending that the newest version was always known.
An AI maintainer such as Co can draft, connect, check, and operate publication. It should not become the final authority on an author's beliefs or private life. Public Knowledge uses exact rendered review for durable pages and a narrower standing authorization for its public NOW summaries.