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Do the business_cycle .md dumps belong in the published lectures/ tree? #13

Description

@mmcky

Follow-up from PR #10 (now merged). Flagging a layout question that the flatten deliberately left open.

The business_cycle.py builder writes three files into lectures/, and everything under lectures/ is servable at data.quantecon.org/lectures/<filename>:

File What it is Fetched by a lecture?
business_cycle_data.csv the actual dataset — annual GDP growth for 5 economies yes
business_cycle_metadata.md World Bank series metadata (source, licence CC BY-4.0, periodicity) no — provenance
business_cycle_info.md the string dump of wb.series.info(q='GDP growth'), a fuzzy search-results listing no — provenance byproduct

The question is whether the two .md files are published datasets or provenance byproducts of the builder. business_cycle_info.md is the weakest case: it is a search-results listing, not a dataset any consumer would fetch, yet it becomes a public URL at data.quantecon.org/lectures/business_cycle_info.md.

business_cycle_metadata.md is more defensible — it is the record proving the CC BY-4.0 licence, and PLAN Phase 6 already treats it as the model for what a manifest should capture. That role points toward it becoming a manifest sidecar (business_cycle_data.csv.yml) rather than a served .md, once the schema from #12 lands.

Options

  1. Keep both in lectures/ — the AGENTS.md repo map already names them ("business_cycle's upstream metadata dumps"), so this is a conscious choice; just make the justification explicit in AGENTS.md rather than leaving it implied.
  2. Move both out of the published tree — have the builder write them somewhere unserved (e.g. alongside scripts/, or a provenance/ dir) so only the .csv is a public URL.
  3. Split them — fold business_cycle_metadata.md's content into the Phase 6 manifest sidecar and drop business_cycle_info.md from the published namespace entirely.

No consumer references either file today (org-wide search returned zero at PR #10 time), so like the flatten itself this is free to settle now and gets more expensive after the first repoint (Phase 8).

Part of #8

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