A stateless collaborator can’t be socialized. Half the contributors to a modern codebase arrive with no memory, read some pages, work, and vanish — so a norm that exists only as prose is followed probabilistically, and the ones that matter get walked up the ladder:
prose → convention (file layout) → mechanism (a glob, a fragment directory) → guarantee (types, CI, a lint)
When you find yourself repeating a correction, that is the signal to walk the norm up a rung. This package is one set of norms at rung four, and every check in it started as a paragraph somebody kept having to repeat.
The demonstration is worth keeping: with the “cite by link” convention written down but unguarded, one corpus drifted not toward unlinked but toward random — the same reference linked sixty times and bare thirty more. Randomness is worse than a uniform mistake, because a reader can’t learn the convention from the corpus and stops trying.