Who Writes the Wiki? From Wikipedia to LLM Wiki to Mikipage

Author: Daniel Zhou · Date: October 4, 2026

Mikipage is named after a wiki. A miki is a wiki maintained by AI, and the product is called Mikipage, not Mikinote, because the page is the point.

Every wiki has to answer one question: who writes it? So far I've seen three answers. Volunteers write it (Wikipedia). Your own AI agent writes it (Andrej Karpathy's "LLM Wiki"). Or everyone writes their own notes and AI writes the wiki from all of them, which is what Mikipage does. This post walks through all three, because each one fixes the problem the one before it couldn't.

Wikis: the right shape, the wrong workload

Wikipedia is the famous one, but the same idea runs Confluence at work, the fan wiki for your favorite game, and the "team wiki" section of Notion. A wiki page has a particular shape:

It's about one subject. A person, a place, a process, a game mechanic. Pages link to each other.
It's written for readers. It has to be clear and well organized, like a document.
It's never finished. A wiki page is a living summary of what everyone currently knows, not a snapshot of one day.
It's written by many people. Nobody knows everything, but together a group knows a lot, and the wiki is where that knowledge comes together.

That's the right shape for knowledge that builds up over time. It's what I always wanted my own notes to turn into: a handful of pages that say what I've come to know about each subject, kept up to date, and readable by my family too.

The problem is the workload. In a traditional wiki, contributors edit the pages directly, so every contribution comes with homework. You have to find the right page, fit your sentence into someone else's structure, follow the formatting, avoid clobbering other people's edits, and sometimes argue on the talk page. And after the writing comes the maintenance: updating cross references, fixing summaries that are now out of date, noticing when a new fact contradicts an old one.

Wikipedia survives that because it has millions of volunteers. Almost everything smaller doesn't. The company Confluence turns into a graveyard of stale pages. The family wiki, the club wiki, the personal wiki usually die within a few weeks, because nobody has time to be the editor.

LLM Wiki: let the AI be the editor

In April 2026, Andrej Karpathy published a short "idea file" called LLM Wiki. It isn't software. It's a description of a pattern, written so you can paste it into an AI coding agent like Claude Code or Codex and have the agent build it with you. It spread quickly, and it named exactly what I had been building toward.

The pattern has three layers:

Raw sources: articles, papers, notes, and data you collect. These are immutable. The AI reads them but never changes them.
The wiki: a folder of markdown pages the AI writes and owns entirely: summaries, pages for people and concepts, comparisons, an overview. "You read it; the LLM writes it."
The schema: a configuration file that tells the AI how the wiki is structured and how to maintain it.

You work with it through three operations. Ingest means you add a source and the AI folds it into the wiki, often touching ten or fifteen pages. Query means you ask a question and the AI answers from the wiki, and a good answer can become a new page. Lint means the AI periodically checks the wiki for contradictions, stale claims, and missing links.

The key insight is in one sentence of the gist: "Humans abandon wikis because the maintenance burden grows faster than the value." An AI doesn't get bored and doesn't forget to update a cross reference. Once the maintenance costs almost nothing, the wiki stays alive. Karpathy compares it to Vannevar Bush's 1945 Memex, a personal knowledge store whose unsolved problem was "who does the maintenance." The answer, finally, is the AI.

That's also the difference from the usual "chat with your documents" tools. Those rediscover your knowledge from scratch on every question. An LLM Wiki builds it up once, keeps it current, and lets it compound.

I think this is the right idea. Mikipage is built on it.

Where LLM Wiki stops for most people

LLM Wiki is a pattern for one technically capable person, and it says so: "a pattern for building personal knowledge bases." That's not a flaw in the idea. It does mean most people can't use it, for four reasons:

Setup. You need an AI coding agent, a terminal, Obsidian to read the result, a schema file you write and keep refining, and ideally a git repo. That's an afternoon for an engineer and a wall for almost everyone else.
One machine. The wiki is a folder on your computer. Away from your desk, on your phone, or on the family iPad, you can't add to it or read it, unless you set up syncing yourself.
An AI subscription. The agent that maintains the wiki runs on a monthly plan that someone has to pay for and someone has to know how to drive.
One person. This is the big one. A wiki was never meant to be a solo artifact. You can hand someone a copy of your git repo, but you can't hand them a living wiki they can add to. The multi-contributor part of the original wiki idea gets lost.

There's one more, quieter difference. Karpathy's sources are mostly things you collect: articles, papers, podcasts, clipped web pages. My raw material is mostly things I write: journal entries, ideas, lessons learned, notes from conversations. Both work, but they lead to different products. A research wiki over a reading pile isn't the same thing as a family's shared memory.

Mikipage: an LLM Wiki for you and your people

Mikipage keeps the LLM Wiki pattern and removes those four walls. If you know the gist, here's how the pieces map:

LLM Wiki	Mikipage
Raw sources, immutable	Notes: your own writing. Nobody else edits them, and AI only touches one when you explicitly ask it to
The wiki, owned by the LLM	Miki pages: written and rewritten by AI, with citations back to the notes they came from
The schema file	Each page's title and instructions, in plain language
Ingest	Write notes, then Refresh a page to fold them in
Query	Ask, over your notes and pages
An agent, Obsidian, and git on your own computer	A browser, on any device
One person's vault	You, plus any groups you share with

A Miki page starts from instructions like "A chronological timeline of the renovation, one line per event" or "Everything about my sourdough experiments, with what worked and what didn't." AI finds the notes that fit, from across everything you've written, and writes the page. One note can feed many pages, so the same note about a contractor's quote can show up on the renovation timeline and on the household budget page without being copied.

Pages can come from either direction. If you already know what you want, write the title and instructions yourself. If you don't, Suggest pages reads your recent notes, spots the themes running through them, and proposes pages for you, much like Karpathy's agent deciding a topic deserves its own page. The one difference is that a suggestion waits for you to accept it. AI infers what the wiki should cover, and you approve before it grows. A page you said yes to is a page you'll read, and the wiki never fills up with pages nobody wanted.

If you already run an LLM Wiki

You don't have to give up your agent. Mikipage has an MCP server, so Claude or any other MCP-capable assistant can save notes, read pages, and maintain them. Tell it "refresh all my pages," and your assistant does the synthesis using the subscription you already pay for, following the same page instructions the website uses. You get the LLM Wiki workflow you already like, while your notes and pages sit in the cloud where your phone, your family, and the public web can reach them.

And if your vault works well for you and you never need to share it, keep it. That's a fine setup, and Mikipage isn't trying to win you over from it.

The group wiki: the part that was missing

Here's what made me build Mikipage instead of just running my own LLM Wiki.

Remember the fourth trait of a wiki: it's written by many people. Traditional wikis had that but made every contributor an editor. LLM Wiki removed the editing but also removed the other contributors. Mikipage keeps both halves:

Everyone writes their own notes, in their own words, in their own space, whenever they like.
Nobody edits anyone else's notes. Not other members, and not the AI.
AI writes the shared pages from all of them. It reasons across everyone's contributions, not just yours.

My wife and I both write notes about our summer trip: she has the flight details and the restaurant her friend recommended, and I have the hotel options and the kids' wish list. Neither of us writes the trip plan. Our group's "Summer trip" page is written from both of our notes, and it updates when either of us adds something. That's a wiki in the original sense, written by many people, without anyone having to be the editor. If we want, we can publish a page for anyone to read.

That's the line I keep coming back to: your notes are sacred; the wiki is alive.

Three answers to one question

Traditional wiki: people write the wiki. It works when the community is large enough to carry the editing work, and it dies when it isn't.
LLM Wiki: AI writes the wiki from your sources. The maintenance problem is solved, for one person, on one machine, with some setup.
Mikipage: everyone writes notes, and AI writes the wiki from all of them, in the cloud, for you and the people you share with.

If you're coming from note apps rather than wikis, [1] tells the same story from the other side. And [2] covers how I got here.