Our Content Types
MNKY Math is organized as a garden, not a single stream of posts.
Different pages do different kinds of work.
Some pages explore ideas. Some stabilize concepts. Some connect MNKY Math to neighboring fields and frameworks. Some turn the framework into usable tools. Others quietly support the garden by clarifying language, preserving context, or connecting ideas across pages.
These differences are called content types.
Content types help readers understand what kind of page they are looking at, how that page is meant to be used, and where it belongs in the larger garden.
They also help MNKY Math stay organized as it develops, expands, and clarifies.
The easiest way to understand content types is by looking at the main areas of the garden where they appear.
Each directory has a different job:
- Archive: where ideas are explored through writing and real-world noticing
- Foundations: where core MNKY Math ideas stabilize
- The Neighborhood: where related external concepts are positioned
- Tools: where the framework becomes usable
- Reference: where the garden gets support, context, and connective tissue
Because each directory has a different job, each directory tends to use different kinds of pages.
Archive
The Archive is where MNKY Math develops through writing, noticing, story, and applied analysis.
Archive pages are often more situated than Foundation pages. They may begin with a real experience, a visible pattern, a question, a tension, or a system that seems to be teaching people something.
The Archive is where ideas are explored before they become stable parts of the framework.
Essays
Essays are developed pieces of writing that explore an idea, pattern, tension, or claim.
An essay usually has a point of view. It may introduce a lens, challenge a common assumption, connect multiple ideas, or show how a system shapes behavior and outcomes.
Essays are one of the primary ways MNKY Math develops in public.
Stories
Stories use narrative, scene, or lived experience to help readers enter an idea.
A story may not explain the entire framework directly. Instead, it gives the reader something concrete to stand inside before moving toward the larger pattern.
Stories are useful when an idea needs to be felt before it can be fully named.
Case studies
Case studies apply MNKY Math to a specific system, situation, organization, product, policy, practice, or event.
A case study is more than an example. It looks at how parts of a system interact and what those interactions produce.
Case studies help show how MNKY Math can be used to examine real-world behavior, outcomes, incentives, tradeoffs, and unintended effects.
Observations
Observations capture something noticed in the world.
An observation may come from work, technology, customer behavior, organizational life, public systems, social patterns, or everyday experience.
Some observations may later become essays, case studies, tools, or Foundation concepts. Others remain useful as small pieces of evidence in the larger garden.
Foundations
Foundations is where core MNKY Math ideas become more stable.
A Foundation page is not just a passing thought or one-time example. It names an idea, lens, pattern, or claim that helps support the larger framework.
Foundation pages may still evolve, but they are meant to become durable reference points within MNKY Math.
Concepts
Concepts are reusable MNKY Math ideas, lenses, or patterns.
A concept helps name something that can appear across many systems, situations, or contexts.
Concepts may begin as rough ideas, but as they mature they can develop clearer definitions, examples, relationships, diagnostic questions, design implications, and principles.
In MNKY Math, a mature concept may begin to govern how something is evaluated, designed, or discussed.
Theses
Theses are central claims MNKY Math is willing to stand on.
A thesis does more than name an idea. It makes a claim about how systems, behavior, measurement, participation, agency, or outcomes work.
Theses help clarify the stance of the framework.
They may be challenged, revised, strengthened, or composted as MNKY Math develops, expands, and clarifies.
The Neighborhood
The Neighborhood is where MNKY Math sits near related ideas, fields, frameworks, theories, and bodies of work.
Neighbor pages do not claim that MNKY Math invented everything it touches. They help show what MNKY Math is learning from, building near, borrowing from, contrasting with, or extending beyond.
The Neighborhood helps readers understand the surrounding intellectual terrain.
Neighbors
Neighbors are related concepts, fields, theories, frameworks, or patterns that help position MNKY Math.
A neighbor may be close to MNKY Math, adjacent to it, useful as a bridge, helpful as a contrast, or connected at a deeper structural level.
Neighbor pages help clarify what MNKY Math shares with existing ideas and where MNKY Math’s lens begins to differ.
The goal is not to create a complete encyclopedia. The goal is to make the surrounding territory easier to see.
Tools
Tools are where MNKY Math becomes usable.
A tool helps readers apply the framework to a situation, conversation, decision, system, design problem, leadership question, or pattern they are trying to understand.
Tools are not meant to create false precision. They are meant to structure attention, improve questions, support clearer judgment, and make system-shaped behavior easier to work with.
Diagnostics
Diagnostics help readers examine a system, situation, pattern, behavior, outcome, or condition more clearly.
A diagnostic may use questions, prompts, checklists, decision paths, or interpretive steps.
The purpose is not always to produce a score. The purpose is to reveal what may be happening.
A question set is one possible form of diagnostic.
Guides
Guides help readers move through a practice, process, or application of MNKY Math.
A guide may include steps, prompts, examples, worksheets, planning questions, facilitation notes, or templates.
Guides are useful when the reader is not only trying to understand an idea, but use it.
Scorecards
Scorecards help readers evaluate something across multiple dimensions.
A scorecard may be used to examine a system, practice, decision, outcome, meeting, metric, tool, or organizational pattern.
In MNKY Math, a scorecard should not pretend that the score is the whole truth.
A good scorecard structures attention. It helps people see where a system may be strong, fragile, distorted, incomplete, or misaligned.
Reference
The Reference directory contains support pages used to clarify language, preserve context, and make the garden easier to connect.
Many reference pages are not meant to be read as primary essays. They often exist so links, previews, Search, backlinks, and Graph View have useful material to work with.
The Reference directory does not appear in Explorer, but reference pages can still appear through links, Search, breadcrumbs, backlinks, previews, and direct URLs.
MNKY Math uses four main reference types: Definition, Reference, Source, and Map.
Each type supports the garden in a different way. Some clarify language. Some preserve context. Some connect MNKY Math to external works. Some explain relationships between ideas.
For internal content management, each reference page uses a short prefix. That prefix may also appear in the page URL shown in the browser’s address bar.
Definition
Prefix: def_
A Definition page clarifies important terms, concepts, and labels used throughout MNKY Math.
They are usually short and are often designed to work well in previews, so readers can get context without leaving the page they are reading.
Reference
Prefix: ref_
Reference pages provide supporting context that does not fit neatly as a definition.
They may explain a convention, preserve a reusable note, clarify a site mechanic, or support repeated links across the garden.
Source
Prefix: src_
Source pages are used for external works, thinkers, books, articles, papers, or ideas that MNKY Math refers to repeatedly.
They act as durable reference points, not full summaries.
Map
Prefix: map_
Map pages may be used when a relationship between ideas needs more explanation than Graph View can provide.
Graph View shows that pages are connected.
A map page can explain why the connection matters.
Exploring the Garden
Reader Modes