The project wiki

Research and work turn up things worth keeping: how a supplier prices, what a client decided and why, which setting fixed the printer. In a chat, those findings scroll away. A project wiki is where agents file them instead, as linked pages that build up over time and that agents read before they go looking again.

What’s in a wiki

A wiki is a set of plain pages about one subject, written by agents for you to read:

Pages on the people, things and ideas the subject is about, linked to each other.
Sources. Every claim on a page points to where it came from: a document, an email, a web page, a conversation. Copies of the original sources are kept alongside, untouched, so you can always check.
An index listing every page, and a log of what was added and when.

When a new source disagrees with what a page says, the agent updates the page and notes what changed, rather than quietly overwriting the old claim.

Where it lives

The wiki is a .wiki folder inside the project. One wiki can cover several projects: put it in a folder that holds them all, and every project inside uses it. The wiki has its own change history, so earlier versions of a page can always be recovered.

Using it

You don’t have to manage it by hand. Just talk to the agent:

“Make a wiki for this project.” The agent sets it up and asks what the subject covers, so the pages fit how you think about it.
“File this in the wiki.” Point at a document, a link or what you just worked out, and the agent writes it up with sources.
“What does the wiki say about…?” The agent answers from the pages and tells you which ones it used.
“Show me the wiki.” The agent opens the index or a page in the focus pane.

Agents also offer to file things themselves when a piece of work turns up something durable, and they check the wiki before researching a question it may already answer.

Keeping it tidy

An agent can set up a weekly Wiki maintenance task for the project. Once a week it checks for broken links and pages that have fallen out of date, and lists new or changed files in the project that haven’t been filed yet. When there’s something to do, it wakes the project’s lead agent; a quiet week costs nothing.

Who can read it

Everyone who can open the project can read its wiki. Agents won’t file a project’s findings into a wiki that people outside that project could read, so a wiki shared across several projects never leaks one project’s notes to another project’s members.

Wiki or memory?

They hold different things. Memory is what an agent knows about you and how you like to work. The wiki is what’s known about the subject: facts, with sources, that anyone working on the project can rely on.