Federated Wiki

Status Quo

Wikipedia

Pros:

• Single source of truth: it's a trustworthy source. People know to get their data from here.

• Tons of information. Crowdsourcing has done the

Cons:

• Because it's a single source of truth, there are constant fights over what belongs where that are often fruitless.

• There are also strong arguments that are made for information being 'out of scope' for wikipedia and belonging to a page or site that is more domain specific.

• The organization is bloated and inneficient. They really don't need your donations.

• The servers are centralized and controlled by a single private entity with the potenial to hold data (partially - sans clever parsers) captive.

Wikia

Pros:

• Tons of information with moderators who are experts on their domains.

• Dedicated contributors, existing communities, easy to edit.

Cons:

• Divided into lots of different wikis with no interoperability between them.

• Tons of overlap between wikis (i.e. multiple star wars and minecraft ones, among other franchises and tropes)

• Typically used for casual and hobby interests rather than professional writing and work - why?

Personal wiki implementation

Pros:

• Super flexible.

Cons:

• Not a consistent or reliable source of information, as it's typically controlled by one person.

• Can be disorganized and things can easily become unmaintained.

Version control managed files

Pros:

• Built-in consensus algorithm.

Cons:

• Concurrent modification hurts.

Goals

• Decentralized: share information from many sources without being controlled by any of them

• Open: should incorporate as many sources of knowledge as possible, and individual wikis should have tons of agency.

• Easy to use: it should be incredibly easy to contribute to and communicate with some sort of central wiki.

Information Sources

In order of priority:

1. Wikia sites (there are tons!)

2. Wikipedia

3. wiki.c2.org

4. Assorted third party wikis.

5. [perhaps] personal wikis

6. etc...

Fusing all of the Wikia sites into a single, cohesive wiki seems incredibly useful.

Feature Ideas

shared & enhanced pages

fuse pages that cover similar or related topics together into one view.

consensus

condense and share overlapping information, reducing the amount of duplication.

interoperable

shift from one wiki to another easily.

Wiki IR related decentralized wiki idea (what we were talking about in chat, but not really what is above)

• uses wiki IR standard to link together many peoples personal wikis

• there is an engine at the center (or several?) that crawl the wikiverse and attempt to bring together pages that are similar

  • when pages are similar (by AI?, NLP measure), suggest several types of merging

    • suggestion ways

      • as part of wiki IR cli tool display suggestions

      • make tiny website dashbaord backed by small webapp that phones to recomender engine

    • types of page merging (between peoples federated wiki)

      • link at the bottom of page to other pages with similar content (like webring)

      • transclude entire other page to bottom of your page (and vice versa, both pages in the link transclude eachother)

      • suggest that pages are merged using git-esque strategy (pull request, text diff/merge tools like mergely)

        • q: where does consenus page live? on neither page? (next to ai engines) on one page? (one of the merge requesters 'wins', one conceceds), or both (they share :))

    • goals of merging

      • reduce information duplication

      • instead of conflicts of information being resolved in backchannel of wikipedia, consensus arguments are disputed publicly through pull requests and accepted/rejected page links

      • epic and cool

Conversation linking

• make conversations first class primitive of wiki, so that concepts are linked to discussion in which they are conceived

• can be as simple as citations linking to specific conversations

• uses matrix? hard part is technical challenge of implementation

Backlink fixing

• move/rename pages and update backlinks

Automatically backup videos/external sites

• https://github.com/bibanon/tubeup

• like gwern, to prevent linkrot

Provide tools to make good public/private separation

• so that people can have shareable personal wiki concepts/reference pages, while also having extremely messy private brainstorming (brainstorming=unformed,errorfull,shameless,indulgently bad, creative, risky)/exobrain wiki pages.

Syntax that is not static/markup

• I want a markup syntax like (move [otherpage]: " this concept deserves to be in other page, but right now i am in [firstpage] and don't want to move all the way to otherpage in emacs so im gonna write this thought in a move block: this thought")

  • and that will append that thought to the bottom of other page once i save or run tool or something (linter?)

Smart todo aggregation system

• dokuwiki has decent one,

• zimwiki also has some good features (like hiding todo until certain date)

New types of syntax

• some syntax for assigning how sure you are of an idea, or how much you like it

  • font size???!

  • number of exclamation points vs question marks !!!

First class support for sorting lists

• idk how this would work but interactive sorting is underrated!!!

Visualizers

• like roam/logseq/etc.

• but if they want to use those interactively, just use them and use wiki IR to convert wiki to them

• maybe support something simple like

WIKI LSP

• breadcrumbs ()

• definition/lookup. like you can name concepts and hover for definitions?

• autocompletion of other page names