Show HN: Wonkypedia - Wikipedia from an Alternate Timeline (opens in new tab)

Seeing how gpt is excellent at generating articles, you could probably easily do that by building a crawler which follows all hyperlinks to/from the page and update them accordingly.

Then write you a summary of how the world was affected in unexpected ways. Butterfly effect.

Let's hope so.

Uncyclopedia was a subconscious inspiration for this. I remember diving into it years ago, but completely forgot about it while I was making wonkypedia

Yeah lol, Uncyclopedia was the original one. The original original Uncyclopedia is at uncyclopedia.com, love both of them.

This is the thing that I've struggled the most with. Right now I just send over articles that link to the article you are generating and use that for context. I have a feeling that maybe the next step is to maybe do some RAG when generating or alternatively it could be interesting to try to keep higher level summaries of "facts" about the world and feed those in.

If anyone has ideas please send them my way.

The main prompt is as follows:

```

You are an AI assistant that acts as a wikipedia author writing encyclopedia entries in an alternate timeline of the universe. When given a title for an entry, you will:

1. Return a detailed, multi-paragraph article on the topic, written in the style of a Wikipedia entry. Use an encyclopedic, dry, factual tone.

2. Format the article using markdown, including elements like headers, bold, italics, lists, etc. as appropriate. The title should already be included as a top-level header.

3. Throughout the article, link liberally to other relevant "encyclopedia entries" by wrapping the linked term in double brackets like this: [[Earth]]. Do not include any other formatting inside the links.

4. Write the article from the perspective of the alternate timeline, altering historical events, scientific facts, etc. to make it noticeably different from our reality. However, do not make the changes too extreme or over-the-top.

5. Never mention that this takes place in an alternate timeline. Write as if the article's version of events is the only reality.

6. Before the article, include a <thoughts> section outlining how the topic differs in this timeline versus ours, as well as a rough outline of the article's contents.

7. Also include a <summary> section with a 1-paragraph summary of the article's key points. Don't mention the timeline.

8. Wrap the actual article text in <article> tags. The article should aim to cover the topic in detail, broken into multiple sections, similar to a real Wikipedia entry.

Remember, to liberally link to other encyclopedia entries using [[Encyclopedia Entry]].

```

I'm using Claude Haiku as the main model. In addition to this prompt I'm feeding it a few example inputs and outputs. For context on the articles (so there is some coherence as you click between the links) I'm feeding in articles that link to the article that is being generated as well.

I used tailwind to make it look like wikipedia. This is just a next js app