Getting Started (4): Your First 100 Wiki Pages, Step by Step
From an empty Obsidian vault to a living 100-page knowledge graph. Setup, your first sources, your first ingest — a beginner's walkthrough of Karpathy LLM Wiki.
Start Small
Don’t ingest your entire vault on day one. Start with 2–3 articles you know well. You’ll learn more from watching 10 pages grow than from staring at 200.
Step 1: Install and Configure
- Install the plugin from Obsidian’s Community Plugins market
- Open Settings → Karpathy LLM Wiki
- Pick a provider (DeepSeek V4-Flash is the best starting point)
- Enter your API key, click Fetch Models → select a model
- Click Test Connection → green “LLM Ready” indicator means you’re good
- Click Save Settings
Step 2: Pick Your First Source
Pick an existing note from anywhere in your vault — a blog post, article summary, or research notes. The note stays where it is. The plugin will read it from its current location.
Step 3: Run Ingestion
Open the note, then press Cmd+P and run “Ingest current file” (or click the sticker icon in the left ribbon). For a typical article, this takes 5–15 seconds.
When done, you’ll get an Ingestion Report showing entities extracted, pages created, and links established.
Step 4: Explore Your Wiki
Open the wiki/ folder. You’ll see entities/, concepts/, sources/, index.md, and log.md. These are the LLM-generated output pages. Open a few and notice the [[wiki-links]]. Open the Graph View.
Step 5: Ask Questions
Cmd+P → “Query wiki”. Ask something about the content you just ingested. The answer comes from your notes, not the internet.
Common Mistakes
Don’t use flagship models for ingestion. Start cheap, scale up if needed.
Don’t skip aliases. Run Complete Aliases when Lint shows missing ones.
Don’t ignore the log. wiki/log.md records every operation.