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When you compile a wiki, you are trusting an LLM to synthesize knowledge from your sources. That trust is only well-placed if you can trace every claim back to where it came from. llmwiki builds provenance tracing into the page format itself: paragraphs carry lightweight citation markers pointing back to the source file that contributed them, and specific claims can pin to exact line ranges within that file. This means you can open any compiled page, see a citation marker, and know precisely which source - and which lines of that source - the content derives from. llmwiki lint validates every citation on every run, and llmwiki eval measures how thoroughly and accurately your pages are cited.

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Paragraph-Level Citations

The most common citation form is a paragraph-level source marker. At the end of a prose paragraph, llmwiki appends ^[filename.md] to indicate which source file contributed that paragraph’s content:
The filename inside ^[...] is relative to the sources/ directory. You do not include the sources/ prefix - just the bare filename as it appears in the sources frontmatter field.

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Claim-Level Citations

For claims that require tighter verification - specific numbers, precise technical assertions, direct quotations - you can pin a citation to a line range within the source file. llmwiki supports two equivalent syntaxes:
Both forms identify the same span: lines 42 through 58 (inclusive) of architecture-notes.md in the sources/ directory. Use whichever form your team prefers - llmwiki’s linter and eval harness treat them identically.
Claim-level citations are tracked by llmwiki eval as the claim_level_citation_rate metric: the fraction of all citations in the wiki that pin to a specific line range rather than a whole file. Higher rates mean tighter, more verifiable provenance. You can set a minimum threshold in .llmwiki/eval/thresholds.yaml.

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How llmwiki lint Validates Citations

llmwiki lint validates every citation marker in every compiled page. It checks for four categories of problems:

Missing source file

The filename inside ^[...] does not exist in sources/. This happens when a source is deleted after compilation or when the LLM hallucinated a filename. Treated as an error.

Malformed citation

The citation syntax is not parseable - for example, ^[file.md:abc] where the range is not a pair of integers. Treated as an error.

Impossible range

A line range where the start line is 0 (lines are 1-indexed), or where the end line is less than the start line (e.g. ^[file.md:8-3]). Treated as an error.

Out-of-bounds range

A line range that extends past the end of the source file (e.g. citing lines 900-950 in a 200-line file). Treated as a warning, since the source may have been truncated on ingest.
Citation errors contribute to the health score computed by llmwiki eval and are listed individually in lint output. Broken citations also trigger the provenance-violating review policy hold mode, so pages with bad citations can be automatically queued for human review rather than written to wiki/.

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What Happens During Source Merge

When multiple sources contribute to the same concept slug, llmwiki merges them into a single page. Epistemic metadata is reconciled across all contributing sources: Citation markers in the merged page body continue to point to the specific source file each paragraph came from. A merged page may therefore carry citations to multiple different files in sources/:

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A Full Example Compiled Page

Here is a complete example showing frontmatter and body with both paragraph and claim-level citation markers:

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Citation Coverage and Eval

llmwiki eval measures citation quality across the entire wiki as part of its health score:
  • Citation coverage - the fraction of prose paragraphs in wiki/concepts/ that carry at least one ^[...] marker. Low coverage means paragraphs are floating without provenance.
  • Citation precision - the fraction of ^[...] markers that point to a source file that actually exists in sources/. A precision below 100% indicates hallucinated or deleted source references.
  • Citation support (--suite full) - samples up to N (claim, source span) pairs and asks a judge model to score each 0–2 (unsupported → fully supported). Results are cached in .llmwiki/eval/citation-cache.jsonl so re-runs only judge new pairs.
  • Claim-level citation rate - the fraction of all citations that use a line-range form rather than a bare filename.
You can set minimum thresholds for all of these in .llmwiki/eval/thresholds.yaml to gate CI pipelines on citation quality. For details on running lint and eval, see llmwiki lint and eval.