Your First Wiki in 20 Minutes
Go from zero to a working LLM knowledge base with nothing but a note-taking app and an AI assistant. No coding, no terminal, no nonsense.
Why build a wiki?
Every time you start a new chat, you lose context. Your AI has no memory of what you discussed yesterday. A wiki fixes that. It gives your AI a persistent, structured knowledge base it can read every time. The more you use it, the better it gets. Karpathy called this the most underrated use of LLMs. We agree.
The 7 steps
Choose your tool
Pick any note-taking app you already use. Notion (recommended for most people), Google Docs (simplest option), or a folder of text files on your computer. Create a new workspace or folder. Name it whatever you want. This is where your wiki lives.
Pick your topic
Choose one topic you care about and already know a little. AI prompt engineering, personal finance, cooking techniques. Narrow beats broad. You can always expand later.
Create your folder structure
Make three folders inside your workspace: "Sources" for raw material, "Wiki" for compiled articles, and "Queries" for questions and answers. That is the entire architecture.
Add your first sources
Copy-paste 3 to 5 articles, blog posts, or notes into the Sources folder. One file per source. These are the raw ingredients your AI will work with.
Write your CLAUDE.md
Create a CLAUDE.md file in your workspace root. This tells the AI what your wiki is about, how to structure articles, and what format to use. We have a template below.
Generate your first wiki article
Open Claude (or any LLM with file access). Point it at your workspace. Ask: "Read the sources and write a wiki article about [your topic] following the schema in CLAUDE.md." Review, edit, save to the Wiki folder.
Query your wiki
Ask a question. "Based on the wiki, what are the three main approaches to X?" The AI reads your compiled wiki, not raw sources, so answers are structured and consistent. Save good answers back.
Starter CLAUDE.md template
Copy this into a file called CLAUDE.md in your workspace root. Replace the bracketed fields with your topic.
# [Your Topic] Wiki ## Purpose A structured knowledge base on [your topic] compiled from curated sources. ## Structure - /Sources — Raw articles and notes (never edited by AI) - /Wiki — Compiled, interlinked wiki articles - /Queries — Questions asked and answers generated ## Article Format - Title as H1 - 2-3 sentence summary at top - Body with H2 sections - "Sources" section at bottom linking to /Sources files - Wiki-style [[links]] to related articles ## Rules - Never modify files in /Sources - Always cite which source(s) informed each article - Use [[wikilinks]] to connect related concepts - Keep articles focused: one concept per page
What comes next
You have a working wiki. From here you can add more sources, generate more articles, and start querying. When you are ready to go deeper:
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