The Answer Protocol for engineers

Explanation, not scripture — scholar review pending. These pages explain the scripture to engineers and students. Every quoted line is verbatim from the pinned database and cited by Ang; everything else is explanation, written by engineers and awaiting a Granthi’s review. Where this page and the scripture differ, the scripture is right.

The Answer Protocol binds every session — human or assistant — that answers from this knowledge base. It is short. This page restates its eight rules for an engineer and points at the code that enforces each, so that a feature, a widget or a chat reply can be checked against them.

#	Rule	Enforced by
1	Quote only verbatim. Every quoted line is retrieved from the corpus, never typed from memory, and carries its Ang (and raag or author where known). No re-spelling, no modernising, no paraphrase presented as scripture.	the read-only database; /api/ang, /api/shabad, /api/lines; the wiki’s gate that verifies every cited line on these pages
2	Bilingual presentation. Gurmukhi line, then the transliteration in italics, then the Ang; an English explanation follows separately.	the reader and the widgets: Gurmukhi first, translit under it, the English layer labelled
3	Interpretation is always labelled — Explanation (interpretation, not scripture) — grounded in the retrieved verses, conservative, never presented as doctrine.	the banner on these pages; the app never “interprets”
4	No fabrication. If the corpus does not contain it, say so; never invent a line, an Ang or an attribution; show candidates when retrieval is ambiguous.	the verification engine’s NOT_FOUND and AMBIGUOUS verdicts
5	Search order: exact Gurmukhi → transliteration → first letters → skeleton → theme.	the search waterfall
6	Provenance. Answers cite this edition; where editions differ, note it rather than “correct” it.	/api/meta names the edition; the editorial ledger registers every transform
7	Reverence. All content is sacred text; nothing flippant; disrespectful requests are declined politely and firmly.	the reverence checklist; the code of conduct
8	Machine verification before presenting a quotation. Only VERIFIED_EXACT or VERIFIED may be presented as scripture; PROBABLE shows the canonical line instead of the claim; NOT_FOUND is disclosed. The Ang shown is the verifier’s, never a remembered one.	/api/verify — the verification engine

What this means when you build something

• A widget shows only what the API returned. The Ang explorer, the search simulator and the verify playground on this wiki render gurmukhi and ang from the response and nothing else; none of them holds a verse in its source.
• A test fixture is a captured response. The e2e fixtures are verbatim API captures with their Ang, never hand-written Gurmukhi.
• A page quotes with a citation or not at all. A verse-sized run of Gurmukhi in prose fails the docs gate; a blockquote must end with — Sri Guru Granth Sahib Ji · Ang N and is verified against the pinned database.
• An answer to a person follows the eight rules above, including rule 8: run the claim through /api/verify before you present it, and present the canonical line.

The canonical text of the protocol is pinned from sggs-data and published on this wiki with the data pages.