Main idea

A glossary entry is not a mini-article. It does not have to tell everything about positioning, backlog or customer signal: it has to make the word usable by someone who needs it in a discussion, a ticket or a decision, within the minute they look it up.

The criterion for finishing therefore changes in nature. It is not "have I covered the whole concept?" — a concept has no whole — but "can the reader now use this word without mistaking its meaning, and recognise when someone else is using it differently?". An entry that answers that question is finished even if it leaves entire swathes of the subject outside.

What overflows is not lost: the reasoning you wanted to write into the entry is exactly the material of an atomic note. The entry delegates the argument and points to it.

Why it matters

This protects the glossary from its most common drift — the entry that grows until it becomes an article, which nobody consults any more because it costs too much to read at the moment it is needed. A glossary is read in passing; a long entry always arrives too late.

It also gives a splitting signal: an entry that overflows signals an atomic note to write, not an entry to flesh out.

Nuances and limits

Brevity is not a formatting instruction: an entry that has to carry a normative meaning and a divergent field usage will be longer than one that carries only one, without ceasing to be usable.

And a term whose meaning is still disputed calls for recording the disagreement rather than settling it in the name of concision.

Open questions

• How do you spot, within an entry already written, the sentence that should have become an atomic note?