Wiki Pattern Discussion — Alex Xi (2026-04-06)

Context

Alex shared Karpathy’s LLM Wiki gist and asked about relevance to our setup (OpenClaw + Obsidian).

Alex’s Thinking

  1. Not just articles — Alex pushed back on a purely article-focused wiki. Wants chats, thoughts, half-formed ideas as first-class sources. “When you drop a hot take or a half-formed idea in a channel, that’s a source too.”
  2. Already doing a lightweight version — MEMORY.md, daily notes, skill files are proto-wiki. Missing: cross-referencing, contradiction detection, systematic ingestion.
  3. Obsidian as the home — wiki should live in the existing Obsidian vault, not a separate workspace. Graph view and backlinks make it immediately visual.
  4. Readwise as a source pipe — 844+ articles saved, 270 read. Natural corpus to seed the wiki.
  5. Slack links as sources — links shared in channels should auto-ingest.

Key Insight

Alex sees the wiki as a thinking tool, not just an archive. The synthesis layer (his evolving positions on topics) matters more than the source summaries. This aligns with Karpathy’s point but goes further — Karpathy emphasizes curation, Alex emphasizes original thinking being captured and evolved.

Connections