Definition
Wikilinks are double-bracket [[page-name]] references that create typed, bidirectional connections between pages in an Obsidian vault or LLM Wiki. They are the fundamental linking mechanism that turns individual notes into a navigable knowledge graph.
Key Points
- Syntax:
[[target-page]]or[[target-page|display text]]for aliased links - Unlike hyperlinks (URLs pointing outside), wikilinks point to other pages within the vault
- Obsidian’s graph view visualizes wikilinks as edges between page nodes
- In an LLM Wiki, the LLM creates wikilinks during ingest based on semantic relationships it identifies
- Wikilinks are the mechanism for the compounding invariant: new pages link to existing ones, deepening the graph
- The lint operation checks for broken wikilinks (links pointing to pages that don’t exist)
Related Concepts
- knowledge-graph — The graph of wikilinks forms an implicit knowledge graph
- lint — Detects broken and orphan wikilinks
- llm-wiki — The pattern that relies on LLM-generated wikilinks for compounding knowledge
- query — Uses wikilinks to navigate from a question to relevant pages
- connection-methods — Five approaches for creating and maintaining wiki connections
Implications
Wikilinks are the lowest-friction mechanism for building a knowledge graph. Every other approach (graph databases, embedding similarity, explicit relationship types) adds infrastructure overhead. For vaults under 100 pages, wikilinks alone provide sufficient navigation and discovery. The trade-off is that wikilinks are semantic (human-readable) rather than computational — they don’t support graph algorithms directly without an explicit export layer.
Sources
^[raw/articles/karpathy-llm-wiki-gist.md]