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Provenance

Mana should not ask you to trust a confident paragraph just because it came from an agent. The wiki should show where important claims came from.

That is the role of provenance.

Source first, synthesis second

Section titled “Source first, synthesis second”

When Mana ingests useful material, the source belongs in the repo before the synthesis. Raw captures, converted PDFs, transcripts, articles, and other inputs can be stored or referenced as source material. Then the agent can create source overviews and synthesis pages that cite or link back to those inputs.

This keeps the generated page connected to the evidence behind it.

Reputable sources matter

Section titled “Reputable sources matter”

Mana’s agent instructions ask for factual claims to be grounded in reputable sources. When a claim depends on an external fact, the page should make that dependency visible instead of burying it inside the agent’s reasoning.

Section titled “How provenance links work”

Mana uses a compact inline marker for claim-level provenance:

Claim text [↗](https://example.com/source "provenance")

The visible link is only the ↗ arrow. The link title must be exactly provenance; the wiki renderer uses that title to style the arrow as a small superscript marker with no underline. Put the marker immediately after the clause or sentence it supports so readers can tell which fact the source backs.

Inline provenance links supplement the rest of the source trail: raw material in raw/, source overviews in sources/, and page frontmatter that lists the sources behind the page. The arrow is the precise reader-facing pointer from one claim to one source.

Provenance is part of maintenance

Section titled “Provenance is part of maintenance”

Provenance is not only for research pages. It also helps with ongoing maintenance:

  • later edits can check the source behind a claim;
  • readers can distinguish sourced facts from interpretation;
  • contradictions can be traced to the specific sources that disagree;
  • stale claims are easier to find when their source is visible.

A page without provenance may still be useful as a draft. A maintained knowledge base should eventually make its important claims inspectable.