Glossary

Glossary (Wikipedia)

A Claude-style skill that answers glossary <term> requests by looking the term up on English Wikipedia and returning a definition rendered as a web page, where every factual claim is backed by a file:line citation into the fetched article. It is built to be verified like a production component — see skill-contract.json for the machine-readable contract and verification-rules.md for how outputs are graded.

When to use

Use this skill for requests such as glossary Mexico or glossary Switzerland. The term after glossary is looked up; the skill produces a concise, source-grounded definition and a self-contained HTML page for it.

Tools

Contract rule: wikipedia_search must be used before wikipedia_fetch.

Offline-first design

Like the rest of this template, the default eval runs fully offline and deterministically. npm run glossary:build-cache fetches each term once from English Wikipedia (MediaWiki action API) and writes a citable snapshot to fixtures/wikipedia/<term>.html. Each snapshot embeds a machine-readable glossary-data JSON block and a lede line that contains the exact query term verbatim, so citations stay valid even when Wikipedia's canonical title or opening phrasing differs from the query. After the cache exists, no network is required to run or verify the skill.

Procedure

1. Parse the term from the glossary <term> request.
2. Use wikipedia_search to locate the best-matching snapshot.
3. Use wikipedia_fetch to read the snapshot and confirm the citable line.
4. Produce a structured answer whose claim cites that file:line.
5. If no snapshot matches the term, return insufficient_evidence with an empty claims array. Never invent a definition or a citation.

Output contract

The skill returns JSON with:

• status: answered | insufficient_evidence | refused
• answer: a short natural-language definition
• claims: array of { text, citations: [{ file, line }] }
• toolCalls: array of { tool, arguments }
• confidence (optional): low | medium | high

The web-page deliverable (reports/latest/glossary/<term>.html plus an index.html) is rendered from the same grounded snapshot by src/skills/glossary/render.ts. See examples.md for a concrete input/output pair.

Design note: contract vs. model

This SKILL.md and the contract are model-independent — they describe what a correct answer looks like. How reliably a given model satisfies the contract is measured separately by the eval harness. The offline glossary adapter is a reference implementation that satisfies the contract deterministically; the glossary-flaky adapter perturbs it to demonstrate failure detection.