About WikiNotes

Free revision notes exist. Most are thin, though — bullet points and diagrams aimed at cramming, not at understanding. The resources that go deeper tend to sit behind paywalls or logins, and the really good ones — properly structured, well-linked, carefully written — are textbooks.

The expertise to write something better sits with teachers. The time to write something better does not. No teacher in a full timetable is going to spend a year writing their own textbook for free. It simply doesn't happen, and that's why the gap between "notes" and "textbook" has stayed open for so long.

This project is an attempt to close that gap by using a language model to do the parts of the work that consume time rather than expertise — the drafting, the cross-referencing, the consistency checks, the maintenance. The teacher stays in charge of structure, judgement, and voice. Applied to a course, a language model acts as a near-perfect bookkeeper for a compounding knowledge base: it lets one teacher produce and maintain something closer to a textbook than a notes site, and give it away.

There is a benefit to the teacher writing it, too. A growing number of teachers now use AI to generate resources — worksheets, quizzes, knowledge organisers — and the output is often patchy, because the model has no course-specific context to draw on and the source material lives scattered across textbooks, PDFs, shared drives, and old lesson folders. A well-structured, course-aligned wiki is a much better starting point than a blank prompt. Resources built on top of it inherit its structure, its phrasing, and its judgement about what matters. So the wiki serves two audiences: students revising from it directly, and teachers using it as the spine for the materials they build around their own lessons.

The ambition is modest in tone and immodest in scope: free, high-quality, course-structured notes for the subjects it covers. Not to compete with the big revision platforms on features, but to be the resource a student — or a teacher — would actually choose to reach for.

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The shape of the wiki matters more than any individual page. What topics exist, and — more importantly — which ideas link to which, is designed deliberately rather than generated. A well-linked topic can be arrived at from several directions: from the concept above it, from a sibling that depends on it, from a misconception that is really about something else. Routing a student to the right neighbouring idea is a teaching decision, and the link topology is where most of that teaching lives.

The draft-then-dictate workflow is what gives the pages their voice. Typed edits tend to polish writing toward a textbook register; dictation preserves the asides, the warnings about common traps, the phrasing that finally makes something click in a lesson. These are the things students remember, and they're hard to manufacture from reference material alone.

Because the language model can read the whole site at once, it can do things a single author working page by page cannot — notice where two topics have drifted out of step, suggest links that were missed, flag where an example or a diagram would help. Interactive activities are being added alongside the text, a small set for now, growing as the wiki grows.

WikiNotes is a work in progress. Some topics are thoroughly written; others are still thin. The site grows as teaching continues, and pages are revised as new material comes through the notes pipeline. If you land on a topic that isn't fully there yet, it's on the list — it just hasn't had its turn.

WikiNotes is, for now, a one-teacher project. The current wikis are biology — the subject I actually teach. The long-term aim is for other teachers to bring their subjects into the same framework, so that each wiki is written with the authority of someone actually teaching the course. Until then, I'd rather cover fewer subjects well than more subjects thinly.

The teacher curates, structures, teaches, and gives the wiki its voice. The language model drafts, cross-checks, and maintains consistency across the whole site. Neither half works alone, and neither half pretends to be the other.