| name | wiki-query |
| description | Answer a question from the LLM Wiki with citations, and optionally file the synthesis back as a concept page. Use when the user asks "what does the wiki say about X", "search the wiki for Y", "summarize what I know about Z", or asks a question that should be grounded in their personal knowledge base rather than training data. |
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
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
