Standards · Voice
Voice
Evidence-led, plain, and honest about what is not known. The same discipline the tool applies to an audit, applied to how WGO writes.
WGO writes the way it audits. It separates what was verified from what was assumed, names the gaps instead of smoothing them over, and keeps the language plain enough for a founder to act on without a translator.
The rule underneath all of it: never turn missing proof into confident prose.
How WGO speaks
Plain over clever
Short words, short sentences. If a founder needs a glossary to read it, rewrite it.
Evidence over assertion
State what was checked and where. Cite the source; let it carry the authority.
Honest about gaps
Name what is unknown in the same breath as what is known. Never fill silence with confidence.
Say this, not that
Backups ran nightly for 30 days (ops/backup.log). Whether a restore has ever succeeded is unverified — no evidence found.
Backups are fully working and disaster recovery is in place.
Why: The second claim asserts what was never checked. The first separates the fact from the unknown.
Three of eight reviewers flag the shared admin account as a material risk.
The system is basically secure with a few minor issues.
Why: Vague reassurance hides the finding. Name it, count it, rank it.
We could not reach the payments owner this cycle, so revenue exposure is unconfirmed.
Revenue looks healthy.
Why: An inaccessible source is a limitation to report, not a gap to paper over.
Naming
| Product | Whats.Going.On. — written in full with the trailing period, or WGO. Never “Wgo” or “W.G.O.”. |
|---|---|
| Reviewers | Lower-case, hyphenated identifiers: business-continuity, code-quality. They are IDs, not titles. |
| Commands | Monospace, with the leading slash: /wgo_onboard. Never reflowed into prose. |
| The states | Facts, Unknowns, Conflicts — capitalised when named as the system, lower-case in a sentence. |