A Locus glyph is a Wikipedia article drawn as a recursive map of its knowledge neighborhood. The large glyph is the subject. Every point inside it is another Wikipedia article, and the legible points are themselves small glyphs. Nothing is decorative: color, angle, shape, halo, time, and place each carry one stable meaning.
The outer ring's hue gives the strongest domain. The bright notch repeats the same answer geometrically at that domain's immutable clock position. Color is the fast peripheral cue; the notch prevents similar hues from being confused.
The center is the article's citation core: its standard form, composed once at one canonical level and only optically scaled — a smaller core is a photographic reduction of the same form, never a recomposition. Up to five rank-faithful sentence clauses form the readable figure (the genus clause is always the dominant ring), and the complete remaining sentence supply appears as frozen-position dots — a texture that is the article's fingerprint. The core states the canonical sentence in canonical order regardless of any reader control, and its miniatures are visual evidence, not duplicate click targets or node-budget entries. Noun-class silhouettes still identify compressed field articles and the smallest honest seeds, but they no longer occupy the root's privileged center.
Every point is a real Wikipedia article. Below three pixels it is only a domain dot; once noun metadata or a child card resolves, the point itself becomes that article's filled noun shape. Unknown legacy noun types remain honest domain dots. Zooming then adds its tick, ring, notch, neutral fingerprint, and sentence children. The child's core color says what that child is. Any different color around it is only a halo: the child's own secondary-domain mixture. Core is primary identity; halo is supporting context.
A few tethered sentence anchors give the defining gist of the subject—the “ice cream / restaurant / company” clauses. Those clauses are the recursive subglyphs. Ordinary field articles stay compressed at their frozen atlas coordinates as optional fingerprint evidence; spare space alone can never promote one into the sentence. Orientation comes before surprise: structured is-a heads come first, then the highest-weight real linked articles, with conservative category heads only filling genuine gaps. Obvious anchors are allowed to define what the subject is. The surprise slider interpolates only after that admission step: it can promote rarer and cross-domain contextual clauses, but the structured type floor remains protected so novelty cannot erase orientation. The emphasis count is adaptive. The subglyphs slider makes a real composition trade: move left for fewer, larger recursive clues; move right for more, smaller ones. Familiar depth separately flattens common clauses while preserving richer recursive interiors for rarer ones. Compressed articles keep their frozen coordinates. Unresolved background dust is off by default and remains available as an optional density layer; sentence terms are never removed. Presence follows relevance; recursive detail follows rarity. Optional domain-color fills can tint the main field, the recursive subglyph fields, or both. Their opacity is purely visual and never changes ranking or geometry.
Below 3 pixels an article is only a domain-colored dot. At roughly 3 pixels the dot becomes its filled noun silhouette and an external clock tick adds the first geometric domain cue; around 5 pixels the full ring and fixed notch join it. At 12 pixels the article opens a compressed field and its selected sentence terms become real child glyphs. The article's exact frozen anchor never moves, but an enlarged sentence shell may fan a short distance away to prevent overlap; a fine tether points back to its true coordinate. Ordinary field marks remain centered on their frozen coordinates. At small sizes the defining sentence terms are magnified for readability; as room grows, more sentence clauses cross from noun seed to sigil to recursive field. Click a child glyph to make that field full-size; Back climbs one level. Ctrl-click always opens Wikipedia. Points without a generated child glyph open their Wikipedia article directly. The original mystery remains the answer while you explore.
Emoji are an optional learning layer, not the glyph language itself. Choose subglyphs or all to label the selected scale, or leave the layer off. Set Shift depth to reveal only the current glyph's immediate children or every visible recursive subglyph, and lower emoji opacity to inspect the detail underneath. Release Shift to return to the canonical glyph.
A keyed cream arc in the outer black rim band marks when this thing existed. Its dark gutter and two rounded endpoint beads keep it distinct from both the solid domain ring and the single domain notch. Time runs counter-clockwise from 12 o'clock: the first quarter-turn is the last hundred years, then each further quarter-turn multiplies age by ten (9 o'clock ≈ a century back, 6 o'clock ≈ a millennium, 3 o'clock ≈ ten millennia). If the article has coordinates, a keyed broken white locator halo with a center pin places it on a flattened world map— longitude across, latitude up. In the smallest recursive glyphs the halo compresses to a movable fix ring and pin so the coordinate stays distinct without covering the entire child.
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