AI Publisher: 5-Agent Article Generation Pipeline and Quality Gates

AI Publisher (github.com/jakefearsd/aipublisher, separate from the Wikantik codebase) is a Java 25, Spring Boot 3.5 and LangChain4j command-line tool that turns a topic into a wiki article by passing one document through five specialised LLM agents. Rather than relying on single-shot generation, it separates research, drafting, verification, editing and review, and loops back for revision when a stage is not satisfied. It runs against a local Ollama server by default (llm.provider=ollama, model qwen3:14b) and against Anthropic Claude with --llm.provider=anthropic and ANTHROPIC_API_KEY.

This guide covers the agent roles, the state machine and revision loop, the quality settings, and the output format.

1. Quick-Reference: The Five Agents

Agent	Role	Output	Runs by default?
Research	Gathers key facts and sources and builds an outline, grounded with Wikidata	`ResearchBrief`	Yes
Writer	Drafts the article in JSPWiki syntax	`ArticleDraft`	Yes
Fact Checker	Verifies every claim against the sources; outcome `APPROVE`, `REVISE` or `REJECT`	`FactCheckReport`	No (`pipeline.skip-fact-check=true`)
Editor	Polishes prose, integrates wiki links, scores quality	`FinalArticle`	Yes
Critic	Reviews JSPWiki syntax, structure and readability	`CriticReport`	No (`pipeline.skip-critique=true`)

The shipped application.properties skips the fact check and the critique, so a plain java -jar aipublisher.jar -t "Topic" runs Research, Writer and Editor only. ./publish.sh (or --pipeline.skip-fact-check=false --pipeline.skip-critique=false) runs all five.

2. State Machine and Revision Loop

CREATED -> RESEARCHING -> DRAFTING -> FACT_CHECKING -> EDITING -> CRITIQUING -> PUBLISHED
                              ^             |              ^            |
                              +--- REVISION LOOP ----------+------------+

Any non-terminal state -> AWAITING_APPROVAL -> continue or REJECTED

With the defaults, a document goes DRAFTING to EDITING and EDITING to PUBLISHED, skipping the two optional phases. A fact check that returns REVISE sends the document back to drafting, and a critique can send it back to editing or drafting. The loop is bounded by pipeline.max-revision-cycles (default 3), and each phase by pipeline.phase-timeout (default PT5M). PUBLISHED and REJECTED are terminal.

Each agent extends a common BaseAgent whose process() method owns the retry loop (3 attempts with exponential backoff by default), timing and contribution recording.

3. Quality Settings

Setting	Shipped default
`quality.min-editor-score`	`0.8`
`quality.min-factcheck-confidence`	`MEDIUM`
`quality.require-verified-claims`	`true`
`pipeline.approval.before-publish`	`true` (a human approves before the file is written; `--auto-approve` skips the prompt)
`pipeline.approval.after-research`, `after-draft`, `after-factcheck`	`false`

WikiSyntaxValidator checks, and where possible repairs, the JSPWiki markup. When a phase fails, the partial document is written to the output directory as PageName_FAILED_<STATE>_<timestamp>.txt with a header naming the phase and error.

4. Inputs and Outputs

Single article: -t "Topic" with --type (concept, tutorial, reference, guide, comparison, troubleshooting, overview or definition), -a for the audience and -w for the target word count (default 800).
Universe mode: --universe <id> generates articles from a topic universe saved by AI Discovery (see AiDiscoveryTopicUniverses); --generate-stubs then fills broken wiki links with short definitions. --analyze-gaps only reports them.
Output: JSPWiki-syntax .txt files in ./output (output.directory, output.file-extension). They are not Markdown; bin/wiki2markdown.py in the Wikantik repository converts them for a Markdown wiki.