Volumes and the bookshelf

Your wiki is not one endless list. It is a shelf of volumes, and exactly one of them is active at a time. The active volume is the one you read, the one your assistant files new pages into, the one the quizzes come from and the one the memory state graph on the home screen is drawn from. Everything else is shelved: still yours, still backed up, but out of the way.

The Bookshelf panel at the bottom of your wiki contents is where all of this happens.

Active volume

312 / 500 items

• Kubernetes, spring term184 items
• 2026-04-02 → 06-30226 items

The active volume

One volume is marked Active volume, with a green dot, a Current badge and a capacity bar counting toward 500 items. That is the size at which Eigma recommends you shelve it and carry on in a fresh one. When the bar fills, the New button for creating a page by hand switches off and the bar turns amber.

The number is not about storage. Two things get worse as a volume grows past it.

Your wiki contents stops being a list you can read and becomes one you scroll: chapters multiply, similar pages drift apart, and finding the page you half-remember takes longer than rereading it.

Your assistant files less well. It decides where a page belongs from the chapters and page titles you already have, and once that structure no longer fits comfortably in its context it is working from a partial view. Pages start landing in near-duplicate chapters, or in new ones that repeat what you had.

The globe on the home screen is this volume as well, and it is a sample rather than the whole of it. Pages are ranked by how little of them is yours and the coldest come first, up to 50 on a computer and 22 on a phone, where fewer planets stay legible under a finger. So a large volume shows you its weakest corner, which is the part worth looking at anyway, and a page you have just mastered is not thrown off the globe for being gold.

Shelve: close this book, open the next

Shelve does two things at once. Your current volume goes on the shelf, out of every view, and a fresh empty volume becomes active.

The shelf is not a lock. A shelved page is out of reach in the ordinary sense that nothing lists it any more, but Eigma does not refuse to edit one if you arrive at it by a direct link. If a page genuinely must not change, lock the page itself.

The Shelve dialog offers a name, already filled in with the date range of the conversations the volume’s pages came from, so 2026-04-02 → 06-30 rather than “Volume 2”. Replace it with something you will recognise. That is worth doing there and then, while you still remember what the volume was, though clicking the name on the shelf renames it later just as well.

What shelving costs you is review. A shelved volume leaves active review entirely: no quizzes from it, no familiarity, nothing on the memory state graph, and it does not appear in your wiki contents. Its pages are kept, exported with your backups and, if you are signed in, synced to your other devices. They are simply not in front of you until you reload it.

Shelving does not pause forgetting. A volume keeps decaying while it sits there, measured from the day you shelved it, so reloading one after six months shows you honestly how much of it has gone.

Reload: take a volume back off the shelf

Reload makes a shelved volume active again. Review, ingest and the memory state graph switch to it.

There is only ever one active volume, so reloading one shelves the current one automatically. That is the whole mechanism for switching: reload the volume you want, and the one you were in goes back on the shelf, still intact. The exception is an empty current volume, which is discarded rather than shelved, so switching straight after a Shelve does not leave empty volumes behind.

Rename and delete

Click any shelved volume’s name to rename it. Renaming changes nothing else.

Delete volume is permanent. It removes the volume and everything in it: pages, quizzes and review history. It does not go to the Trash and no undo reaches it. Only shelved volumes can be deleted, so the volume you are working in is never one click away from this. If the volume was published, deleting it removes the community copy too. Export a backup first from Settings if there is any doubt.

Publishing to the community

Signed in, with a volume that has pages, you can Publish it to the community. Both the active volume and shelved ones can be published. Once published, a shelved volume carries an accent dot next to its name, and the active volume’s Publish button becomes a Published menu.

Publishing takes a snapshot with a title, description, author, tags, language and category. Keep editing afterwards and the published copy does not follow: Update version pushes a new snapshot when you want it to.

Unpublish removes the volume from eigma.app permanently, along with every rating and review it collected. Your pages stay in Eigma, and you can publish them again, but they will come back as a new volume with none of that feedback. That one is worth being sure about.

Importing someone else’s volume works the same way in reverse, and it is the one import that moves your shelf: the volume you are in goes to the shelf, and the imported one becomes active. If your current volume is empty, it is simply used for the import instead.

When to shelve

Before the judgment, the mechanism, because it decides everything else: pages cannot move between volumes. A page is filed into whichever volume is active when it arrives and stays there. Shelving does not sort anything or split anything. It draws a line under what you have and opens an empty volume after it.

So a volume is a stretch of time, not a subject. What you are choosing, every time, is only where to draw that line.

Draw it when the subject changes, not on a schedule. Shelving on the first of the month gives you a shelf of volumes you have to date-match to search. Shelving when you finish a course and start an unrelated one gives you a shelf of subjects, and the volume you are in stays about one thing.

Late costs you less than early. Everything in the active volume is what you get reviewed on, so shelving too early puts material you are still learning out of reach, and reloading to get at it shelves whatever you moved on to. Shelving too late costs you a mixed volume, which is untidy but still reviewable.

Do not shelve to fix bad filing. If pages are arriving in the wrong chapters, a new empty volume changes nothing about the pages already filed, and it cannot pull them along. Rename and merge the chapters instead: that is what your assistant reads before it files.

Do not separate what you want to see connected. The memory state graph draws the active volume and nothing else, and links between pages form inside a volume. Two topics that genuinely inform each other only stay connected while they are in the same one, and nothing can join them again afterwards.

500 is a limit, not a target. Reaching it is a reason to shelve. Not reaching it is not a reason to keep a finished subject in front of you, and most volumes are better closed well before the bar fills.

The default worth starting from: one volume, shelved when you move on to something unrelated. Shelving is cheap and reversible. What is not reversible is the sorting, because there is none.