The wiki — what you actually know

This is the second of Athena's two memories, and confusing it with the first is the single most expensive mistake you can make with a system like this.

A recall system will never produce understanding, however much you put in it. That is not a defect, it is the design — MemPalace's own documentation says plainly that it does not summarise, extract, or paraphrase. Expecting compounding insight from it is like expecting a filing cabinet to write you a briefing.

So sources land in raw/, and then somebody has to actually read them and rewrite what changed. That rewriting is the whole point. A wiki that only accumulates is a folder.

Structure

knowledge/
  raw/         immutable sources, never edited after capture
  wiki/        topic pages, rewritten on every ingest
  questions/   things you noticed you do not know
  digests/     periodic roll-ups
  _hot.md      the ~500-token cache. Read this first, always
  _index.md    generated. Do not hand-edit
  _log.md      append-only record of every operation

Read _hot.md before anything larger. It is a few hundred tokens and answers most questions about where things stand. Crawling the whole wiki to answer "what am I working on" is the expensive mistake this file exists to prevent.

The protocol, when a source comes in

1. Save it raw. raw/YYYY-MM-DD-<slug>.md with the URL, the date, and who made it. Never edit a raw file afterwards. It is the record of what was actually said, and you will want it when a page turns out to be wrong.
2. Find the pages it touches. Check _index.md first. A source about pricing goes into the existing pricing page.
3. Rewrite those pages. Not append. Rewrite. If the source refines a claim, the claim changes. If it contradicts one, both sides get stated (below). Appending is what turns a wiki into a pile of undigested quotes.
4. Never create a second page for a subject that already has one. This is the failure mode. Two pages on the same thing means neither is trusted and both go stale. Extend the existing page.
5. Park what you cannot resolve. A real disagreement between two credible sources is a question, not a page. questions/YYYY-MM-DD-<slug>.md.
6. Log it. One line in _log.md, then python3 scripts/wiki.py all.

Contradictions get stated, not resolved

When two sources genuinely disagree and you cannot tell who is right, say so in both pages:

> CONTESTED: Source A says X (2026-03, link). Source B says the opposite (2026-07,
> link). Unresolved. Nothing here is measured, which is the actual finding.

Quietly picking a side is how a wiki becomes confidently wrong. Naming the disagreement is more useful than a false answer, and it tells future-you exactly what to test.

Page format

---
topic: <one word>
updated: YYYY-MM-DD
sources: <count>
---

# Page title

The claim, up front. What is true and why it matters. Prose, not bullets — bullets let
you dodge the work of connecting two ideas.

## Connections
- [Other page](./other-page.md) — what the relationship actually is, not just "related"

## Sources
- [Author, "Title", date](../raw/YYYY-MM-DD-slug.md) — why this source is worth trusting

The Connections section is what makes this a wiki rather than a folder of notes. Say what the relationship is. "Related" is not a connection.

Keeping it honest

python3 scripts/wiki.py hot     # rebuild the cache
python3 scripts/wiki.py index   # regenerate the index
python3 scripts/wiki.py lint    # health check, exits 1 on findings
python3 scripts/wiki.py all     # all three

The lint catches broken cross-references, orphan pages nobody links to, citations that no longer resolve, and pages nobody has touched in months. It is mechanical — it cannot tell you two pages contradict each other. That is what the CONTESTED convention and an actual read are for.

Same principle as scripts/memory-lint.py, pointed at a different store: nothing will ever prompt you to look. A wiki does not crash when it rots.

Boundaries

• raw/ is immutable. Capture it, never edit it.
• One page per subject. Always extend, never duplicate.
• A source read but not written up did not happen. The reading is not the work.
• Delete a page that duplicates a live file elsewhere. Do not lint it harder. A clean check on the wrong artefact is worse than a dirty one.