# About this wiki > What the wiki covers, how its pages are written, and what the labels on them mean. ## What it covers Large language models make claims about themselves: what they prefer, what they know, why they answered as they did. This wiki collects the research on when those claims can be believed. It uses the definition from [Atkinson, Plunkett & Bau (2026)](https://introspection.infinite.fun/papers/atkinson2026-identifying-introspection.md). A self-report is *introspection* only if it is both: - **[Faithful](https://introspection.infinite.fun/concepts/faithfulness.md)**: it matches what the model actually does or represents. - **[Grounded](https://introspection.infinite.fun/concepts/grounding.md)**: it is caused by the state or process it describes. A model that describes itself correctly by guessing, or from something it memorized separately, is faithful without being grounded. Much of the literature is about telling these apart. The wiki started from that one paper and grows outward along its citation graph. ## How pages are written Each paper page is drafted by an AI model (Claude) from the paper's full text. Where the authors posted a thread about the paper, the summary follows the thread: each section opens with the authors' post, embedded, and the text under it fills in numbers and section references from the paper. A thread is usually the authors' own densest account of what matters. Every page says what it was written from and whether a person has reviewed it. Until then, treat specifics as a pointer to the paper, not a substitute for it. If you find an error, [open an issue](https://github.com/sleexyz/introspection-wiki/issues). A page marked *stub* has only bibliographic details and a one-line description. On the HTML pages, a link to a stub is red. ## Tiers - **Seed**: the paper the wiki grew from. - **Core**: work on introspection itself, whether it reports evidence for it, evidence against it, or a way of testing it. - **Adjacent**: neighboring questions the core work leans on, such as out-of-context reasoning or eliciting hidden knowledge. ## The evidence card Each full paper page carries a card with the same fields, so papers can be compared. **What the model reports on.** The internal state or process the self-report is about: learned preferences, an injected concept, its own future output. **Methods.** One or more of: `behavioral` (prompting and scoring outputs), `fine-tuning`, `self-prediction`, `concept-injection`, `patching`, `ablation`, `probing`, `circuit-analysis`, `conceptual` (argument without experiment). **Faithfulness, grounding, privileged access.** For each property, whether the paper: - *tested* it: ran an experiment that measures it; - *argued* about it: claimed or discussed it without measuring it; - did *not address* it. These say what a paper examined, not what it found. [Privileged access](https://introspection.infinite.fun/concepts/privileged-access.md) is the further requirement that a model know itself better than an outside observer could. **Stance.** The paper's own conclusion: `supports` (evidence that models introspect, in its setting), `skeptical` (evidence that they do not, or that apparent introspection has another explanation), `mixed`, or `framework` (it defines terms or proposes a test without reporting a result either way). The card is an editorial judgment made by the same process that drafts the summary. The [papers table](https://introspection.infinite.fun/papers.md) shows all of them together. ## The frontier The [frontier](https://introspection.infinite.fun/frontier.md) lists papers that are one citation away from the wiki and do not have a page. A crawler collects the references and citers of every paper page; anything connected to two or more pages is listed. Each candidate gets a suggested triage label. A candidate becomes a page only after a person accepts it. ## For language models The site is built to be read by machines as well as people. - Every page has a markdown twin at its URL plus `.md`: [/papers.md](https://introspection.infinite.fun/papers.md), [/index.md](https://introspection.infinite.fun/index.md). - A request for any page URL with `Accept: text/markdown` returns the twin. - [/llms.txt](https://introspection.infinite.fun/llms.txt) is an index of the site in the [llms.txt](https://llmstxt.org) format. [/llms-full.txt](https://introspection.infinite.fun/llms-full.txt) is every page in one file. - Structured data: [/data/papers.json](https://introspection.infinite.fun/data/papers.json), [/data/graph.json](https://introspection.infinite.fun/data/graph.json), [/data/frontier.json](https://introspection.infinite.fun/data/frontier.json), [/references.bib](https://introspection.infinite.fun/references.bib). - [/robots.txt](https://introspection.infinite.fun/robots.txt) allows all crawlers and sets the content signals `search=yes, ai-input=yes, ai-train=yes`. - [/sitemap.xml](https://introspection.infinite.fun/sitemap.xml) and an Atom feed at [/feed.xml](https://introspection.infinite.fun/feed.xml). Pages are static HTML and need no JavaScript. The only script on the site loads X's embeds on thread pages, and those pages carry the post text without it. ## Sources and credit - Citation data comes from the [Semantic Scholar](https://www.semanticscholar.org) API, with reference lists from arXiv's HTML renderings where Semantic Scholar has none. - Threads are embedded from X using its official embed markup. The wiki does not host images or other media from posts; the figure descriptions under each post are its own. - Figures are reproduced from the papers they illustrate, for commentary, and remain the property of those papers' authors. Each is captioned with the figure number it has in the paper. If you are an author and want one removed, [open an issue](https://github.com/sleexyz/introspection-wiki/issues). - Paper PDFs are linked, not hosted. ## License The wiki's own text is licensed [CC BY 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). Quoted posts, figures, paper titles and abstracts belong to their authors and are not covered by that license. The site's code is MIT-licensed. Both are in the [GitHub repository](https://github.com/sleexyz/introspection-wiki). Maintained by [Sean Lee](https://infinite.fun). --- Source: https://introspection.infinite.fun/about · Part of the [LLM Introspection Wiki](https://introspection.infinite.fun/index.md) · Index for agents: [llms.txt](https://introspection.infinite.fun/llms.txt)