wiki-lint
Wiki Lint — Health Audit
You are performing a health check on an Obsidian wiki. Your goal is to find and fix structural issues that degrade the wiki's value over time.
Before scanning anything: follow the Retrieval Primitives table in llm-wiki/SKILL.md. Prefer frontmatter-scoped greps and section-anchored reads over full-page reads. On a large vault, blindly reading every page to lint it is exactly what this framework is built to avoid.
Before You Start
- Read
.envto getOBSIDIAN_VAULT_PATH - Read
index.mdfor the full page inventory - Read
log.mdfor recent activity context
Lint Checks
Run these checks in order. Report findings as you go.
1. Orphaned Pages
Find pages with zero incoming wikilinks. These are knowledge islands that nothing connects to.
How to check:
- Glob all
.mdfiles in the vault - For each page, Grep the rest of the vault for
[[page-name]]references - Pages with zero incoming links (except
index.mdandlog.md) are orphans
How to fix:
- Identify which existing pages should link to the orphan
- Add wikilinks in appropriate sections
2. Broken Wikilinks
Find [[wikilinks]] that point to pages that don't exist.
How to check:
- Grep for
\[\[.*?\]\]across all pages - Extract the link targets
- Check if a corresponding
.mdfile exists
How to fix:
- If the target was renamed, update the link
- If the target should exist, create it
- If the link is wrong, remove or correct it
3. Missing Frontmatter
Every page should have: title, category, tags, sources, created, updated.
How to check:
- Grep frontmatter blocks (scope to
^---at file heads) instead of reading every page in full - Flag pages missing required fields
How to fix:
- Add missing fields with reasonable defaults
3a. Missing Summary (soft warning)
Every page should have a summary: frontmatter field — 1–2 sentences, ≤200 chars. This is what cheap retrieval (e.g. wiki-query's index-only mode) reads to avoid opening page bodies.
How to check:
- Grep frontmatter for
^summary:across the vault - Flag pages without it, but as a soft warning, not an error — older pages predating this field are fine; the check exists to nudge ingest skills into filling it on new writes.
- Also flag pages whose summary exceeds 200 chars.
How to fix:
- Re-ingest the page, or manually write a short summary (1–2 sentences of the page's content).
4. Stale Content
Pages whose updated timestamp is old relative to their sources.
How to check:
- Compare page
updatedtimestamps to source file modification times - Flag pages where sources have been modified after the page was last updated
5. Contradictions
Claims that conflict across pages.
How to check:
- This requires reading related pages and comparing claims
- Focus on pages that share tags or are heavily cross-referenced
- Look for phrases like "however", "in contrast", "despite" that may signal existing acknowledged contradictions vs. unacknowledged ones
How to fix:
- Add an "Open Questions" section noting the contradiction
- Reference both sources and their claims
6. Index Consistency
Verify index.md matches the actual page inventory.
How to check:
- Compare pages listed in
index.mdto actual files on disk - Check that summaries in
index.mdstill match page content
7. Provenance Drift
Check whether pages are being honest about how much of their content is inferred vs extracted. See the Provenance Markers section in llm-wiki for the convention.
How to check:
- For each page with a
provenance:block or any^[inferred]/^[ambiguous]markers, count sentences/bullets and how many end with each marker - Compute rough fractions (
extracted,inferred,ambiguous) - Apply these thresholds:
- AMBIGUOUS > 15%: flag as "speculation-heavy" — even 1-in-7 claims being genuinely uncertain is a signal the page needs tighter sourcing or should be moved to
synthesis/ - INFERRED > 40% with no
sources:in frontmatter: flag as "unsourced synthesis" — the page is making connections but has nothing to cite - Hub pages (top 10 by incoming wikilink count) with INFERRED > 20%: flag as "high-traffic page with questionable provenance" — errors on hub pages propagate to every page that links to them
- Drift: if the page has a
provenance:frontmatter block, flag it when any field is more than 0.20 off from the recomputed value
- AMBIGUOUS > 15%: flag as "speculation-heavy" — even 1-in-7 claims being genuinely uncertain is a signal the page needs tighter sourcing or should be moved to
- Skip pages with no
provenance:frontmatter and no markers — treated as fully extracted by convention
How to fix:
- For ambiguous-heavy: re-ingest from sources, resolve the uncertain claims, or split speculative content into a
synthesis/page - For unsourced synthesis: add
sources:to frontmatter or clearly label the page as synthesis - For hub pages with INFERRED > 20%: prioritize for re-ingestion — errors here have the widest blast radius
- For drift: update the
provenance:frontmatter to match the recomputed values
8. Fragmented Tag Clusters
Checks whether pages that share a tag are actually linked to each other. Tags imply a topic cluster; if those pages don't reference each other, the cluster is fragmented — knowledge islands that should be woven together.
How to check:
- For each tag that appears on ≥ 5 pages:
n= count of pages with this tagactual_links= count of wikilinks between any two pages in this tag group (check both directions)cohesion = actual_links / (n × (n−1) / 2)
- Flag any tag group where cohesion < 0.15 and n ≥ 5
How to fix:
- Run the
cross-linkerskill targeted at the fragmented tag — it will surface and insert the missing links - If a tag group is large (n > 15) and still fragmented, consider splitting it into more specific sub-tags
Output Format
Report findings as a structured list:
## Wiki Health Report
### Orphaned Pages (N found)
- `concepts/foo.md` — no incoming links
### Broken Wikilinks (N found)
- `entities/bar.md:15` — links to [[nonexistent-page]]
### Missing Frontmatter (N found)
- `skills/baz.md` — missing: tags, sources
### Stale Content (N found)
- `references/paper-x.md` — source modified 2024-03-10, page last updated 2024-01-05
### Contradictions (N found)
- `concepts/scaling.md` claims "X" but `synthesis/efficiency.md` claims "not X"
### Index Issues (N found)
- `concepts/new-page.md` exists on disk but not in index.md
### Missing Summary (N found — soft)
- `concepts/foo.md` — no `summary:` field
- `entities/bar.md` — summary exceeds 200 chars
### Provenance Issues (N found)
- `concepts/scaling.md` — AMBIGUOUS > 15%: 22% of claims are ambiguous (re-source or move to synthesis/)
- `entities/some-tool.md` — drift: frontmatter says inferred=0.10, recomputed=0.45
- `concepts/transformers.md` — hub page (31 incoming links) with INFERRED=28%: errors here propagate widely
- `synthesis/speculation.md` — unsourced synthesis: no `sources:` field, 55% inferred
### Fragmented Tag Clusters (N found)
- **#systems** — 7 pages, cohesion=0.06 ⚠️ — run cross-linker on this tag
- **#databases** — 5 pages, cohesion=0.10 ⚠️
After Linting
Append to log.md:
- [TIMESTAMP] LINT issues_found=N orphans=X broken_links=Y stale=Z contradictions=W prov_issues=P missing_summary=S fragmented_clusters=F
Offer to fix issues automatically or let the user decide which to address.