Show HN: We had AI write a wiki from 45k Enron emails, every fact cited

Facts on these pages are sentences, each with a date and a source, rather than fields like headcount or revenue. Fields belong in a CRM or another system of record, and a brain like this one sits beside it, holding what changes too often or doesn't fit in a field. We describe the three kinds of company knowledge, and where each one lives, in The missing middle of company knowledge.

The pipeline proposed 57 narrow types and a person kept 54 of them. Almost all were kinds of organization, so we group these lists by a coarser class and keep the pipeline's own type as a tag on each entity.

Companies, regulators, law firms, banks, newspapers. What the company deals with.

Enron's own business units, desks, platforms, systems and codenamed projects.

The pipeline also found 78 products and platforms, 76 facilities and market points, and 49 events, listed without pages. Choosing which kinds of entity deserve a page is the setup a person does when configuring a company brain, and we made that choice before building any page. Every company's mail names things it doesn't need to track, in categories that are a bit of a mess: restaurants from catered events, airports from travel, movies mentioned in passing. Enron's mail is no different. The facilities include trading hubs, Enron Field, a parking garage and two tankers. The events mix business conferences with charity bike rides and Cirque du Soleil. The products mix software with an exchange, a statute and trade associations.

The right choice depends on the company. An event company should have pages for its events, a property manager for its facilities, and a hardware maker for its products. For Enron we gave pages to organizations named in at least 25 messages, and to the five most-discussed parts of Enron itself: three business units, a trading platform and a trading system. A real company brain wouldn't filter by count. A customer you signed today might have sent one or two emails, and you'd still want its page. The cutoff stands in for the judgment a person makes about what's worth keeping in the brain.

We're this+that. We made these pages with a prototype of something we're building.

We wanted a corpus anyone can check our work against. Enron's mail is public because the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) released it during its investigation, and Carnegie Mellon has maintained it since 2003. It's a large, free and widely used body of a real company's internal correspondence. The company's history is also settled, so a page claiming, for example, that Dynegy agreed to acquire Enron in November 2001 can be checked against the record rather than taken on trust.

The mail shows the story in pieces. For the whole of it, read The Smartest Guys in the Room by Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind, who covered Enron's rise and fall as senior writers at Fortune.