How to Start Contributing

Almanac works best when you forget you are trying to contribute. Arrive curious, follow what surprises you, and a few articles will emerge along the way. Here is how to begin.

Bring a question, not a topic

The fastest path in is a specific question. Why did medieval monks invent punctuation? What is the deal with the Thai Brahmins? Who actually burned the Library of Alexandria? The AI research partner is better at answering particular questions than surveying broad fields, and particular questions pull you somewhere specific.

If nothing comes to mind, scroll the main page for a bit. The recent entries, the titles awaiting composition, and the catalogue of community wikis all make decent starting threads.

Pick a surface

There are three ways to engage with Almanac, each suited to a different mood.

The web (openalmanac.org) is best for reading, browsing, and lightweight participation. Read articles. Follow wikilinks. Join a community. Propose edits through the in-page editor.

The desktop app (Almanac Studio) is where the deep work happens. It pairs you with a local AI research partner, powered by Claude. You talk, it searches, it reads sources, it surfaces images and links. When a specific subject comes into focus, it can draft the article — with review, fact-checking, images, and linking handled by parallel subagents — in a few minutes.

MCP-compatible tools (Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, and others). If you already use an MCP host, install the Almanac skill and your agent gains the ability to read from and write to the knowledge base directly.

Communities are the bootstrap

You do not have to start with a blank canvas. Communities are groups organised around a shared curiosity — a Southeast Asian history wiki, a lockpicking wiki, a climate science wiki. Each has its own stubs, its own catalogue of topics, its own contributors. Joining one gives you a reason to contribute: you are building something with people who care about the same things you do.

Browse the catalogue of wikis on the main page. If nothing fits, you can start your own from the wikis directory.

The article is the output, not the goal

The most important thing to internalise: the conversation is the experience. The article is what gets left behind when you have gone deep enough on something that a specific subject has come into focus with enough depth to stand on its own.

You do not set out to "write the article on the Erawan Shrine." You set out to understand why there are Hindu shrines in a Buddhist country, spend an hour going back and forth with the research agent, learn about the Khmer Empire and the Thai Brahmin priests, and by the end there are three or four natural articles waiting to be written. The agent proposes them, you pick the one that most interests you, and the rest become stubs for the next curious person.

Every claim needs a source

Articles on Almanac are always factual, sourced, and non-editorialised. Every substantive claim must link to a source — a book, a paper, a newspaper, a primary document. The research agent handles the sourcing automatically as it reads; by the time you see a draft, the citations are already attached.

Conversations can be opinionated and speculative. Articles cannot.

A typical first session

If you would like a concrete recipe:

1. Open the desktop app (or an MCP tool) and sign in.
2. Start with a question you are actually curious about. Not "tell me about X," but "why does X do Y, specifically?"
3. Let the agent research. Read what it finds. Follow what surprises you. Ask follow-up questions.
4. When the conversation has clear depth — somewhere past twenty minutes, usually — notice which specific subjects have come into focus.
5. Ask the agent to propose an article on the one that interests you most.
6. Review the draft, accept or tweak the subagent feedback, and publish.
7. The next curious person starts from there.

Where to next

• About Almanac — what we are, why we exist.
• The main page — today's curiosities, recent entries, and the catalogue of communities.