Wiki Governor

Wiki Governor

The skill that keeps the wiki not just maintained but accountable. It does not add knowledge and it does not re-run audits by hand — it orchestrates the maintenance skills, then measures whether the vault is living up to its own rules and getting healthier over time.

Prerequisites

The obsidian-vault MCP server must be connected. Verify with /mcp before running. Governor invokes wiki-librarian and wiki-synthesizer always, and wiki-warehouse if the vault has any warehouse-linked notes; load whichever apply alongside it.

Note on commands: /govern is a natural-language trigger — write it in the chat window. It is NOT a Claude Code CLI slash command.

Principles

1. Orchestrate, don't duplicate. Governor calls wiki-librarian /audit, wiki-synthesizer /synthesize, and — when the warehouse is in use — wiki-warehouse /warehouse-audit. It only implements what none of them do: compliance, health scoring, gap surfacing. If a check already lives in another skill, cite it — don't re-scan.
2. Measure, don't game. The health score is a mirror, never a target. Report sub-metrics honestly, including regressions. A score that is being optimized instead of earned is worse than no score — say so if you see it happening (Goodhart's law).
3. Report before acting. Inherit the librarian's confirm-before-destructive discipline. Governor auto-applies only the low-risk fixes the librarian already classifies as safe.
4. Leave a trail. Every run appends a governance report to today's journal and updates Maps/_context.md.
5. Cadence over impulse. Designed to run weekly, or when last_governed is more than 7 days old.

/govern [scope]

Scope options: maintain (Phases 1 only), audit (Phases 2–4, no fixes), or omit for the full loop.

Phase 1 — Maintain (orchestrate existing skills)

1. Run wiki-librarian /audit — full structural audit. Auto-apply only the fixes the librarian classifies as low-risk; surface medium/high-risk fixes for confirmation.
2. Run wiki-synthesizer /synthesize — compile any pending journal ideas and Sources/raw/ files.
3. Check whether any vault note carries a doc_id (a wiki-warehouse pointer). If so, run wiki-warehouse /warehouse-audit — both halves — and keep its corrupt/missing/dangling/drifted counts for Phase 3. If no doc_id notes exist, skip this step; the warehouse simply isn't in use for this vault, which is not itself a finding.

Governor invokes these; it does not reimplement their checks.

Phase 2 — Constitution compliance audit

Hold the vault to knowledge-os/constitution.md. Map the librarian's and warehouse's findings to the laws they break — Law 9 is the only check governor makes itself:

Output a compliance table: law, pass/fail, and the specific pages violating it. Law 9 is governor's own distinctive check — it's about the governance run itself, so nothing else is positioned to verify it.

Laws 6, 7, and 8 exempt system files — Maps/_context.md, Maps/_ask_log.md, Maps/_gaps.md, and System/ (see the constitution's "Scope of Laws 6, 7, and 8"). Never report these as island, provenance, or premature-mature violations: they are machine-maintained, read by path rather than by wikilink, have no prompting journal entry, and status: mature on one means "stable" rather than "well-connected" — so a flag against them can never be resolved. Take scope from the constitution, not from a law's headline sentence read in isolation.

Law 10 (distill, don't dump) is checked via a body-length heuristic on notes carrying a doc_id (wiki-librarian's Check 6.5, reference implementation in skills/wiki-librarian/scripts/check_vault.py) — a threshold, not a semantic judgment of whether a note is genuinely distilled, so treat a pass here as "no obvious dump detected," not certainty. A note that pads a real dump with commentary to stay under the character limit would slip through; that's a real limitation of a purely mechanical check, not something to paper over.

Phase 3 — Health score

Compute six sub-metrics, then roll them into one transparent score. Five come from a single MCP query over the vault; the sixth reuses the wiki-warehouse /warehouse-audit results gathered in Phase 1:

health = Σ (submetric × weight), reported as a 0–100 score and its components — never the headline alone. Show the delta versus the previous run. Weights are transparent and adjustable; the point is the trend, not the absolute number.

Warehouse integrity is conditional, not always-on. "Warehouse-linked docs" are vault notes carrying a doc_id (from wiki-warehouse). If none exist, the warehouse isn't in use for this vault — drop the sub-metric entirely and renormalize the remaining five weights to sum to 1.0. Do not score it 0 (unfairly tanks the score for an unused feature) or 1 (falsely implies a clean bill of health). Corrupt/missing/dangling each count as a full penalty — the original or its pointer is actually broken. Drifted counts at half weight, since a drifted path is stale-but-fixable, not a break (see wiki-warehouse's references/warehouse-schema.md for the corrupt/missing/dangling/drifted definitions).

Record in Maps/_context.md under ## Health with the date, so the trajectory is visible run over run.

Phase 4 — Knowledge-gap queue

Make the wiki notice what it does not know. Aggregate every ## Open questions entry across the vault plus every entry in Maps/_ask_log.md (written exclusively by wiki-operator's /ask — governor reads it, never writes it) into Maps/_gaps.md, ranked by how many pages reference or depend on each gap. This is the vault's to-learn queue — the input that tells you where to point the next learning session.

Phase 5 — Governance report + hot cache

If today's journal doesn't exist yet, create it first with write_note from assets/journal.md, then append — append_note refuses to silently create a frontmatter-less file. Append to today's journal:

## Governance run — YYYY-MM-DD

- Maintained: [librarian fixes applied], [synthesizer pages compiled], [warehouse-audit result, or "warehouse: not in use"]
- Compliance: [N laws passing / M total]; provenance gaps: [[page]], [[page]]
- Health: [score]/100 ([+/-Δ] vs last run) — connectedness X, maturity Y, freshness Z, provenance P, resolution R, warehouse W (or "warehouse: n/a")
- Top knowledge gaps: [gap], [gap], [gap]

Then update Maps/_context.md: set last_governed, write the ## Health block, and list the top gaps under ## Open threads.

Cadence & session start

At session start, read Maps/_context.md. If last_governed is more than 7 days ago, suggest running /govern — do not run it unprompted. (An optional SessionStart hook can automate the reminder; configure it via the update-config skill rather than hard-coding it here.)

Output discipline

• Never inflate the health score. A regression is the most useful thing a run can report — lead with it.
• Confirm before any destructive fix; only librarian-classified low-risk fixes apply automatically.
• The score is diagnostic, not a grade. If a metric is being gamed (e.g., links added only to move connectedness), flag it rather than celebrating the number.
• Governor never invents knowledge — Phases 2–4 only measure and organize what the other skills produced.