Refresh and generations
How wikis stay current — the generation lifecycle, stale banners, and failure behavior.
The generation lifecycle
A wiki is built by a generation, and a generation moves through four states:
- Pending — queued for generation.
- Awaiting index — the repository is being read and indexed.
- Running — pages are being written.
- Completed — the wiki is live, or Failed — see below.
Wiki view showing the generation controller mid-run with state visible.
Failure keeps the lights on
A failed generation does not take your wiki down. The previous completed generation stays live, and the failure banner tells you a newer attempt didn't finish. Your team keeps reading the last good version while you retry.
Stale/failed banner over a still-readable wiki page.
Stale, and saying so
When the repository moves ahead of the wiki, the reader says so: a stale banner marks pages whose source has changed since the last generation. Stale is a signal to refresh, not an error — the content remains honest about what it was generated from.
Refreshing
A refresh starts a new generation from the repository's current state. When it completes, it becomes the live wiki and the old generation retires into history. You can look at past generations when you need to know what the wiki believed last week.