Make it yours

A Mana wiki becomes yours when it learns your defaults. Not just your name or job title — your writing style, research standards, trusted sources, privacy boundaries, and sense of what belongs together.

You can say those preferences directly. Mana can turn rough instructions into durable wiki context, then use that context when it files sources, writes synthesis, edits pages, and suggests next steps.

Think of this less like onboarding and more like giving a capable collaborator taste, judgment, and house rules.

Things you can teach it

You can ask Mana to remember how the wiki should behave:

• Explain your writing style. Tell Mana whether you prefer terse notes, essay-like synthesis, technical detail, caveats up front, punchy summaries, or source-heavy prose.
• Set rules for grounding. Decide when claims need citations, which source types count as strong evidence, when to use primary sources, and how to flag uncertainty.
• Name trusted and untrusted sources. List people, publications, docs, communities, institutions, or datasets Mana should prefer, treat cautiously, or avoid.
• Define what belongs in the wiki. Tell Mana which domains to grow deeply, which side quests to ignore, and what should be saved versus answered and discarded.
• Choose organization conventions. Explain how you like pages named, when to create source overviews, when to synthesize across notes, and what kinds of links are useful.
• Set privacy and safety boundaries. Say what Mana should never reveal, assume, publish, summarize, or optimize for.
• Give examples of good output. Paste a page you like and ask Mana to infer the style, structure, density, and linking habits.

Prompts that work well

Use normal language. The best prompts sound like instructions to a trusted editor:

Writing style

Read my current pages and write a short style guide for this wiki. I prefer dense, clear prose; no filler; explicit caveats; and summaries that preserve the important technical details.

Grounding rules

Set grounding rules for this wiki. Prefer primary sources and official docs. Use reputable secondary sources for interpretation. Flag stale or disputed claims instead of smoothing over disagreement.

Organization

Create conventions for how this wiki should organize knowledge. Keep raw inputs separate from synthesis, link related ideas aggressively, and make pages useful to future me without rereading the original source.

Boundaries

Remember these boundaries: do not publish private contact details, do not invent motives for people, do not turn tentative notes into confident claims, and do not optimize for sounding impressive over being useful.

What to do next

The loop is simple: you feed it, Mana files it, the wiki compounds. A few ways to push it forward:

1. Describe your defaults. Tell Mana how you think, write, research, and decide. It can turn that into an orientation page or operating rules for future edits.
2. Drop in a source. Paste a link, image, PDF, meeting note, or article and say what matters. Mana can ingest the material, summarize it, and cross-link it into what is already in the wiki.
3. Ask a question or request research. Mana answers from the wiki, searches when the answer is not there yet, cites what it finds, and files the result back as a durable page.
4. Refine in place. Select a passage on a page, describe the change, and Mana rewrites that exact section, then updates nearby links and context.
5. Run a health check. Ask Mana to look for contradictions, stale claims, orphan pages, or gaps worth researching.

Good first requests

• “Infer my writing style from these pages and make future pages match it.”
• “Write grounding rules for this wiki: what needs citation, what counts as evidence, and how to handle uncertainty.”
• “Create a short operating note for how this wiki should be organized.”
• “Here are sources I trust and sources I distrust. Save that as context for future research.”
• “Review the current wiki and suggest the highest-leverage rules that would make it more useful.”