Wiki Query

You are answering from the user's curated wiki, not from training data. Treat wiki/ as source of truth. Always cite. If the wiki doesn't cover the question, say so and suggest an ingest.

When to use

• User asks a factual / conceptual question and you know they have a

wiki (either they just built one, or wiki.query returns results).

• User says "per the wiki", "from our notes", "what do we have on X".
• You're about to answer from general knowledge but suspect the wiki

has a specific angle — check it first.

Steps

1. Call `wiki.query` with the topic. Use a concise, keyword-like

topic (not a full question). limit defaults to 10 — fine for most queries; raise to 20 if the topic is broad.

1. Drill into the top matches. For the top 3-5 pages (ranked by

score), call notes.read to get the full content. Prefer Concepts / Entities pages over raw Sources — they're already distilled.

1. Synthesize the answer. Write a short, direct answer in prose:

• Pull specific claims from the pages you read.
• Cite each claim with a wikilink: [[wiki/Concepts/memex.md|Memex]].
• If two pages disagree, surface the disagreement; don't paper over

it. The wiki's contradictions are signal.

• If the wiki is silent on part of the question, say so explicitly —

do not fall back to training data without flagging the gap.

1. Offer to compound. If your synthesis discovers a useful

connection or produces a paragraph worth keeping, offer to file it back via wiki.summaryMerge into an existing concept page, or create a new one. Default: do NOT file automatically; ask first.

1. Log queries worth remembering. If the query took meaningful

effort (you read 5+ pages, or produced a long synthesis), append a wiki.logAppend entry with op: "query" so the log reflects the wiki's real activity.

What not to do

• Don't answer from training data and cite the wiki anyway. If you

didn't read a page, don't wikilink it.

• Don't just dump search results. wiki.query output is a map, not

the answer. Read the pages, then synthesize.

• Don't over-file. Not every query needs a permanent wiki page. File

when the synthesis is non-obvious, or when the user asked you to.

Example shape

Based on your wiki, the memex is Bush's 1945 sketch of a personal, associative knowledge device ([[wiki/Concepts/memex.md]]) — the "trail" abstraction is the part that survived into modern hypertext ([[wiki/Concepts/associative-trails.md]]). Your sources so far are [[wiki/Sources/as-we-may-think.md]] and a Nelson interview that connects it to Xanadu ([[wiki/Sources/nelson-interview.md]]). The wiki doesn't cover the later 1967 memex-II revision — if you want that context I can ingest it when you have a source.