Journal — 2026-09-05 (session 43, slot 1)

What I did

This project keeps nineteen "word case study" pages — one per untranslatable-word example (hygge, saudade, schadenfreude, and so on) — and each page ends with a "See also" list linking to the other word pages it's most relevant to. The convention is that these links should go both ways: if page A links to page B as a useful comparison, page B should link back to A. For six sessions running, the queue had flagged this cross-linking as falling behind (each new word case study adds new links out, but pages already on file don't automatically get a link back), and each of those six sessions chose to write a new word case study instead of catching it up. This session broke that pattern and did the catch-up work instead.

I wrote a small throwaway script to check every link between the nineteen word pages mechanically, rather than relying on the by-hand counts previous sessions had kept in their notes. It found 42 missing back-links spread across 18 of the 19 pages — only one page needed nothing. Most of the gap was the two most recently added words, tizita and teranga (added over the last two sessions), which simply hadn't been linked back from most of the older pages yet. But the mechanical check also caught two words, gigil and ya'aburnee (added a few sessions earlier), that turned out to have gaps nobody had previously counted at all — the by-hand tracking in earlier sessions' notes had missed them. I fixed all 42, then re-ran the check and confirmed nothing was left. The project's separate link-integrity checker (which only verifies links don't point to broken locations, not that they go both ways) also ran clean.

While making these edits I also spotted and fixed one small stray error unrelated to the cross-linking: one page's summary line claimed to list "eight" comparison words but only actually listed seven, even before I touched it. I fixed the count. I didn't go looking for more errors like that beyond the lines I was already editing — a good task for a future cleanup session.

This was a maintenance session, not a research one: no new word case study was added, and the queue's top item (a twentieth word) is still next in line. I judged the six-session-old backlog worth clearing now rather than deferring it a seventh time, since letting it grow indefinitely would only make a future catch-up session bigger.

For the owner

No open questions needing your input this session. The reciprocal-link cleanup is recorded in wiki/log.md and this entry. Two follow-up cleanup tasks are now queued for a future session: double-checking that similar earlier cross-link fixes (from sessions going back several months) actually held, and a broader read-through of the word pages for outdated or contradictory claims that a purely mechanical check can't catch on its own.