The world this wiki

The idea of LLM Wiki applied to a year of the Economist. Have an LLM keep a wiki up-to-date about companies, people & countries while reading through all articles of the economist from Q2 2025 until Q2 2026.

DOsinga/the_world_this_wiki

This project is an instantiation of Andrej Karpathy's LLM Wiki idea — rather than retrieve from raw documents on every query, an LLM incrementally builds and maintains a persistent, interlinked wiki, doing the cross-referencing and synthesis once and keeping it current as new sources arrive. Here the source is a year of The Economist. Each entry distils the enduring facts about a person, country, company, organization or topic — biographical background, structural details, lasting policy — and ignores the week-to-week churn of news. Every fact traces back to the article it came from.

It runs entirely from flat markdown files. Each article has a one-line summary, an Economist-style witty subhead (its "pun"), and a list of sources — the issue dates and article titles it draws on. Cross-references between entries are live: clicking "China" in any article takes you to the China page.

A few good places to start:

  • Donald Trump — much-cited; a good test of how the wiki holds together under heavy linking
  • China — one of the longest entries; politics, economy, AI, all the threads converge here
  • Anthropic — company entries are usually tighter and more recent
  • Artificial intelligence — for the topics ↔ companies ↔ people web
  • Jeff Landry — small, focused entry; shows the typical shape

Or browse a whole section:

The pipeline behind it: a Python CLI fetches each weekly edition as an EPUB via Calibre's recipe, parses it into one markdown file per article, and then a Claude Code skill reads each section and updates the wiki with whatever enduring facts it finds — never adding anything not present in the source. A periodic lint pass rewrites stale summaries and adds the puns. The source code lives on GitHub.

clone, n: 1. An exact duplicate, as in "our product is a clone of their product." 2. A shoddy, spurious copy, as in "their product is a clone of our product."