Conciseness

The body is dense with operational rules (depth tiers with KiB budgets, exact ledger paths, per-claim-state rules) and teaches nothing Claude already knows, so it is well past anchor 3. Not 5 because the Checkpoint section ("Observe what the vault actually contains, think about contradictory or missing evidence, verify every material citation...") largely restates the Retrieve/Assess/Answer sections, and the untrusted-evidence paragraph enumerates example payloads that could be trimmed.

Actionability

Concrete, executable commands are given with flags ("python3 \"$CORE\" contracts --vault \"$VAULT\" --verify --capability wiki-retrieve", "python3 \"$RETRIEVE\" --vault \"$VAULT\" \"$QUERY\" --top 5 --no-rerank --explain") plus specific ledger paths and a citation format ("[[Page#Heading]]"). Not 5 because the PRODUCT_ROOT block is a non-executable placeholder ("PRODUCT_ROOT=/absolute/path/to/installed/claude-obsidian") — the skill says to resolve it from its own location but never shows how — and $VAULT/$QUERY resolution is left implicit.

Workflow Clarity

The Retrieve section is a numbered sequence with an explicit verification gate (contracts --verify before using the index), a path-containment check ("Read candidate pages only after confirming each reported path stays inside $VAULT/wiki/"), branch handling for Quick vs Standard/Deep, and a defined error-recovery fallback ("If retrieval is unavailable, degraded, empty, or stale, fall back to wiki/index.md... Say which fallback was used"). This matches the anchor-5 pattern of explicit validation steps with feedback loops; a 4 would require missing checkpoints, which are present throughout.

Progressive Disclosure

The body is well-sectioned and its three outgoing links are one level deep with stated purpose ("[wiki-retrieve](../wiki-retrieve/SKILL.md) for cache and rerank behavior", "[wiki-cli](../wiki-cli/SKILL.md) for read/search transport selection", the provenance rules reference). Not 5 because none of the referenced targets exist in the shipped bundle — there are no references/, scripts/, or assets/ directories and the ../wiki, ../wiki-retrieve, and ../wiki-cli paths do not resolve — so the references cannot actually be navigated from this skill as packaged.

Specificity

"Answer an explicitly vault-scoped question from an Obsidian wiki without changing it" names the domain and one clear concrete action with a read-only constraint, but does not enumerate the skill's several capabilities (indexed retrieval, claim-ledger provenance assessment, wikilink citation). Not 4 because anchor 4 requires several distinct listed actions; not 2 because the action stated is specific, not generic.

Completeness

Both parts are explicit: the what ("Answer an explicitly vault-scoped question from an Obsidian wiki without changing it") and the when ("Use when the user selects the vault as the evidence source: ..." with concrete trigger phrases), plus a negative boundary ("Do not route ordinary general-knowledge questions here"). This matches the top anchor exactly; a lower score would require a weaker or implicit 'when' clause, which is not the case.

Trigger Term Quality

The when-clause lists natural user phrasings — "query the wiki, query quick, query deep, explain from the wiki, summarize the vault, find in wiki, search the wiki, or based on the wiki" — giving good keyword coverage. Not 5 because common synonyms like "my notes", "per my vault", or "according to the vault" are absent; not 3 because coverage clearly exceeds a single generic keyword.

Distinctiveness Conflict Risk

It carves out a clear niche — read-only, vault-scoped Q&A from an Obsidian wiki — with distinct trigger phrasing and an explicit exclusion ("Do not route ordinary general-knowledge questions here") that minimizes mis-triggering against general search or note-mutation skills. Fits the anchor-5 example pattern of a distinct niche with dedicated triggers.