wiki-lookup

Wiki Lookup

Answer a question from the wikis: pick the destination, query the map, read only the pages that matter, answer with citations.

Authority: the selected wiki's SCHEMA.md when present; otherwise inspect its catalogue and layout. The destination's status, freshness, contradiction, and evidence conventions govern the answer. One deliberate override: this skill never performs the write half of the schema's Query operation (filing answers back, query log entries, commits). Persistence is a separate /wiki-ingest transaction. When the same user request asks to both look up and save, finish the lookup, then hand the result to wiki-ingest as its own transaction; otherwise mention wiki-ingest only when filing the answer back would clearly pay.

Never author or edit wiki pages, catalogues, or logs, and never create commits. The sole permitted mutations are in the stale-state recovery below: a fast-forward synchronisation of a clean ~/wiki checkout, followed by a qmd index refresh when it pulled anything. Never pull a containing project repository as part of a lookup.

Pick the destination, then the collection

Project root: the workspace root the harness reports; otherwise the nearest ancestor of the working directory containing .git, CLAUDE.md, or AGENTS.md; otherwise the working directory itself.

• A question specific to the current or an explicitly named project: that project's <project root>/wiki/ when it exists.
• Project-scoped question, no project wiki: ~/wiki/, including its pages/<project>/ routing-exception area.
• Cross-project knowledge, reusable tooling, personal setup, personal facts: ~/wiki/.
• Scope genuinely spans both: search both destinations.

Map each selected wiki to a qmd collection by absolute path via mcp__qmd__status, never by name-guessing. A destination with no matching collection is searched on the filesystem instead: read its SCHEMA.md or sniff the layout first, and do not assume pages/ or index.md exist (project layouts vary, e.g. concepts/, entities/, sources/).

Search: map first, bodies last

1. Skim the destination's index.md or equivalent catalogue to spot canonical pages and disambiguate terms.
2. For destinations with a qmd collection: one mcp__qmd__query call, explicitly scoped via collections to the selected collection names (omitting it searches every collection) and always with intent. Sub-queries: lex for exact terms from the question and known aliases (names, IDs, error strings), vec for the question's meaning, hyde (a short hypothetical answer passage, roughly 50 to 100 words) when the vocabulary or likely answer is unclear.
3. rg -n -i over the destination's page directories for concrete identifiers qmd may rank poorly (dates, codes, file paths), and as the recovery when a page written earlier this session is not yet indexed.
4. Destinations without a collection: add a separate synonym/paraphrase text search; exact terms alone miss reworded overlap.

Never answer from search snippets. Retrieve each shortlisted page in full and follow related: links and [[wikilinks]] one hop when a page points at a more specific one. Retrieval: mcp__qmd__get with #docid for individual results; mcp__qmd__multi_get only with globs or fully qualified qmd://<collection>/<path> values, never unqualified relative paths across collections (same-named files like index.md and SCHEMA.md collide).

Answer discipline

• Cite each supporting page as a clickable absolute path resolved from its own wiki root; never an unqualified qmd-relative path.
• Preserve every qualifier the destination's schema defines: page status, freshness, contradiction markers, evidence strength. For the global wiki specifically: flag ruled-out and snapshot pages as such, and treat [source: conversation, weak] as a claim with no retained evidence. Do not transfer global-wiki meanings to a project wiki unless its own conventions define them.
• Report last_compiled when freshness materially affects the answer; do not invent a staleness threshold the destination does not define.
• A <!-- CONTRADICTION --> marker (or the destination's equivalent) near a cited claim is reported, never silently resolved into one side.
• Distinguish what the wiki states from what you infer across pages; keep the hedge the pages support.
• The wiki not answering is a valid result: say so and name the nearest pages found.
• Never quote secrets or unrelated personal data from pages beyond what the question needs.

Stale-state recovery

When the selected destination is ~/wiki/ and the complete initial search finds no answer, run this once before concluding absence:

1. git -C ~/wiki status --porcelain must be empty; then git -c core.hooksPath=/dev/null -C ~/wiki pull --ff-only (hook suppression keeps the recovery deterministic; the post-merge hook would otherwise run a full lint).
2. Dirty checkout, no usable upstream, diverged history, or a failed pull: do not stash, merge, rebase, or reset. State that remote freshness could not be verified and answer from the unchanged local state.
3. If the pull advanced HEAD: run qmd update && qmd embed (update has no working collection filter in qmd 2.5.3, so this refreshes every configured collection), then search again through qmd and rg before concluding absence.