Adding a concept or people page

Overview

Both concepts/*.md and people/*.md pages have the same shape: a synthesis in your own words, paired with verbatim excerpts from the source book. The two page types are close enough to share one skill — concepts are Wilber's ideas, people are the thinkers he engages with, but the authoring process and the quote-integrity rules are identical.

The one rule that matters most: every quote must be real, checked text — not a paraphrase, not a reconstruction from memory. A page shipped once with a paraphrase formatted as a verbatim blockquote (attribution line and all) and nothing about the format made that visible. That is what this skill exists to prevent. See "Verifying quotes" below — it's not optional.

When to use

Adding a new concepts/<slug>.md or people/<slug>.md page.
Editing an existing page's excerpts (adding, replacing, or trimming a quote).
Asked to audit/critique existing excerpts for accuracy (see docs/excerpt-critique-*.md for the format and depth of a full audit pass).

Sourcing

Source from the actual book text — library/<work-slug>-full-text.md — never from personal reading notes or from memory. If you're not looking at the source file with a grep or a Read while writing a quote, you're not sourcing it, you're recalling it.

Page shape

Frontmatter:

---
title: <display title>
slug: <matches filename>
aliases: [<lowercase alternate names/spellings>]
category: core-term | wilber-on-x   # concepts/ only
relationship: ally | critiqued | mixed | source   # people/ only
status: draft
works: [<work-slug>, ...]           # must match a key in the verification
                                     # script's WORK_SOURCES map
---

Sections, in order:

## Wilber's View — synthesis in your own words. Note what's strong and what's contestable; this isn't a neutral encyclopedia entry.
## In *<Work Title>* — the excerpts (see below).
## See Also — [[wikilink]]-style cross-links to related concept/people pages.

Reference implementations: concepts/holons.md, people/habermas.md.

Excerpts

Show quotes directly. No foldable/accordion callout syntax (> [!quote]- "teaser") — that was tried and explicitly rejected (see docs/concept-wiki-vision.md's "Design update" section). Plain blockquote, full text, attribution line, done.
No per-excerpt heading. The surrounding synthesis prose already gives context.
3-8 quotes per page is the normal range. More is fine if the material supports it.
Cite the actual chapter, not the Book/Part title ("Book 1" spans chapters 1-8 — don't use it as a chapter citation). If a quote is from an endnote rather than the main text, say so: — *Sex, Ecology, Spirituality*, ch. 9 (footnote).
Ellipsis marks any elision. If you're skipping text mid-quote or joining two non-adjacent passages, mark it with ... — silently smoothing a join, or silently swapping the source's actual trailing punctuation for a period to make an excerpt read as a complete sentence, is exactly the kind of "close enough" edit that produces an unverifiable quote. Cut to the last full clause instead, or use ....
A quote starting mid-sentence keeps the source's actual capitalization (usually lowercase) and leads with ... — don't capitalize the first word to make the excerpt look self-starting. This was the single most common failure found when this script was first run against the existing wiki.
A trailing "." can substitute for the source's real (different) closing punctuation — that's the one tolerance the verification script allows. A trailing quotation mark cannot: closing a quotation early asserts the quoted material ends there, which is a content change, not punctuation smoothing.
Bold within a quote sparingly, only to flag the single most load-bearing phrase — don't bold whole sentences.

Verifying quotes (mandatory, every time)

Before considering any page (new or edited) done, run:

python3 skills/add-excerpt-page/scripts/verify_quotes.py concepts/<slug>.md people/<slug>.md

(omit filenames to check the whole repo). It checks every blockquote against the actual source file, tolerant of ... elisions, editorially-dropped italics, and a quote-ending "." substituted for the source's real continuation — but not tolerant of wording that plain isn't there. A failure means fix the quote or drop it — not argue with the script. See the script's own docstring for exactly what it checks and why each tolerance exists.

Rationalizations to watch for (yours, mid-task)

Thought	Reality
"I'm confident this is roughly what it said"	Confidence isn't verification. Grep the source.
"It's basically what Wilber means here"	A paraphrase-as-quote is exactly the failure this skill exists to prevent. Either find the real sentence or write it as prose in the synthesis, not as a blockquote.
"I'll just end it with a period, cleaner"	If the source doesn't end there, that's a silent edit. Use `...` or stop one clause earlier.
"The critique/verification step is for someone else to run later"	You wrote the quote; you verify it before calling the page done.
"It passed a human read-through"	The fabricated Habermas quote also passed a human read-through — twice. Run the script.

Cross-page catalog updates

After adding a page, update concepts/index.md or people/index.md (link the new page, keep the existing sort order), and add [[wikilink]]s from/to genuinely related existing pages — don't force a link that isn't textually supported.

Deeper background

docs/concept-wiki-vision.md, docs/annotatable-reading-layer-vision.md, docs/excerpt-critique-concepts.md, docs/excerpt-critique-people.md — the vision docs and the full audit-pass reports this skill's rules were distilled from.