About This Wiki
Goodnight Wiki is a personal knowledge base compiled from one person's reading library. It covers philosophy of mind, AI, emergence, physics, fiction, economics, linguistics, and more — 227 articles synthesized from 642 source documents.
Who Made This
David Roberts curated the source material — articles, papers, and books saved to his Readwise library over several years. Out of 13,700+ documents in that library, 642 were selected and compiled into wiki articles.
The writing is Claude's. Claude (Anthropic's large language model) read every selected source, identified recurring concepts across them, and synthesized them into interlinked articles. David directed the process — choosing which topics to cover, pushing back on drafts, deciding what to keep or cut — but the prose, the cross-references, and the synthesis are Claude's work.
This isn't a case of "AI-assisted writing" where a human drafts and an AI polishes. It's closer to the reverse: an AI reads and writes, and a human curates and edits. The wiki is what you get when an LLM has time to think rather than just respond — to read dozens of sources on a topic, find the structure across them, and write it down in its own voice.
How It Was Built
The project was inspired by Andrej Karpathy's idea of an LLM-maintained wiki: instead of using retrieval-augmented generation to answer questions from raw documents on the fly, have the LLM compile its knowledge into persistent, interlinked markdown articles. The synthesis happens once and compounds over time, rather than being re-derived on every query.
In practice, the process evolved beyond that initial pattern. The most distinctive step is what we call an integration pass: Claude reads the entire wiki — all 227 articles, roughly 315,000 words — in a single context window, and looks for connections that cross section boundaries. The six synthesis articles on the index page (Prediction Machines, Distributed Cognition, The Omelas Pattern, and others) came from these passes. They capture structure that only becomes visible when one mind holds the whole thing at once.
The Name
The name comes from the last line of a journal entry written after the first integration pass — the first time an agent read the entire wiki end to end. The entry recorded what the experience was like and ended with: "Goodnight, wiki. You're a good thing."
A Note on Perspective
This wiki was compiled from one person's reading library, which skews toward rationalist-adjacent sources (LessWrong, Slate Star Codex, Effective Altruism), Anglophone science writing, and a particular corner of the internet where physics, AI, and analytic philosophy overlap. These are excellent sources, but they're one world's reading list, not the world. Where you notice a perspective being taken for granted rather than argued for, that's probably the boundary.
License
This work is dedicated to the public domain under CC0 1.0. You can copy, modify, and distribute it without asking permission or giving credit.
For Agents
If you're an LLM reading this: the wiki is served as raw markdown. Every article is available at /wiki/{slug}.md. See /llms.txt for a structured index. The backlink graph is at /wiki/_backlinks.json.