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A summary is a linked item, not a stand-in for its source

Context and Problem Statement

trilium-recall showed a note's summary in place of its source note when the summary's own best passage matched almost as well (within 0.05 of cosine similarity), so that a reader got the short page and a pointer to the long one. The Trilium connector carries trilium-recall's sync over to passageway, whose core knows no source (V1). Where does that rule go?

Considered Options

  • A protocol field that marks an item as "stands for" another, and ranking code in the core that substitutes it.
  • The connector decides at indexing time which of the two to index.
  • Both are indexed as items that link each other; the core shows the other as a related item of a hit, as it does for every link.

Decision Outcome

Chosen option: "both are items that link each other", because the first option is a field only one connector would use and ranking code that behaves differently for one source's notion of a summary, which V1 rules out, and the second loses the source's detail. The summary carries a wikiSource relation to its source, and the connector adds the reverse link to the source, so a hit on either shows the other among its related items.

The cost is measured, not assumed: on trilium-recall's public fixture the connector scores hit@3 0.92 and silence 1.0 against trilium-recall's published 0.83 and 1.0. The one miss is the fixture's German summary question, for which nothing passes the gate at all, not even the source, so the old rule (which only swapped a summary in for a source that was already a hit) would not have answered it either; the fixture does not show the rule's loss. If a real question set shows the loss to matter, a generic mechanism (an item's weight already exists; a "prefer the shorter of two linked items" rule would be the next candidate) is the way to bring it back, for every source.

Consequences

  • Good, because the core stays free of Trilium's notion of a summary, and every connector gets the same link behaviour.
  • Good, because the measurement that decides whether the rule is missed is public and repeatable.
  • Bad, because a question answered by a source's long text may show the source rather than its summary, and the summary only as a related item.