Status Quo
Wikipedia
Pros:
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Single source of truth: it's a trustworthy source. People know to get their data from here.
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Tons of information. Crowdsourcing has done the
Cons:
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Because it's a single source of truth, there are constant fights over what belongs where that are often fruitless.
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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.
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The organization is bloated and inneficient. They really don't need your donations.
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The servers are centralized and controlled by a single private entity with the potenial to hold data (partially - sans clever parsers) captive.
Wikia
Pros:
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Tons of information with moderators who are experts on their domains.
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Dedicated contributors, existing communities, easy to edit.
Cons:
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Divided into lots of different wikis with no interoperability between them.
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Tons of overlap between wikis (i.e. multiple star wars and minecraft ones, among other franchises and tropes)
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Typically used for casual and hobby interests rather than professional writing and work - why?
Personal wiki implementation
Pros:
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Super flexible.
Cons:
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Not a consistent or reliable source of information, as it's typically controlled by one person.
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Can be disorganized and things can easily become unmaintained.
Version control managed files
Pros:
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Built-in consensus algorithm.
Cons:
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Concurrent modification hurts.
Goals
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Decentralized: share information from many sources without being controlled by any of them
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Open: should incorporate as many sources of knowledge as possible, and individual wikis should have tons of agency.
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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:
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Wikia sites (there are tons!)
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Wikipedia
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Assorted third party wikis.
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[perhaps] personal wikis
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etc...
Fusing all of the Wikia sites into a single, cohesive wiki seems incredibly useful.
Feature Ideas
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shared & enhanced pages :: fuse pages that cover similar or related topics together into one view.
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consensus :: condense and share overlapping information, reducing the amount of duplication.
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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)
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uses wiki IR standard to link together many peoples personal wikis
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there is an engine at the center (or several?) that crawl the wikiverse and attempt to bring together pages that are similar
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when pages are similar (by AI?, NLP measure), suggest several types of merging
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suggestion ways
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as part of wiki IR cli tool display suggestions
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make tiny website dashbaord backed by small webapp that phones to recomender engine
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types of page merging (between peoples federated wiki)
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link at the bottom of page to other pages with similar content (like webring)
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transclude entire other page to bottom of your page (and vice versa, both pages in the link transclude eachother)
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suggest that pages are merged using git-esque strategy (pull request, text diff/merge tools like mergely)
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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 :))
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goals of merging
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reduce information duplication
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instead of conflicts of information being resolved in backchannel of wikipedia, consensus arguments are disputed publicly through pull requests and accepted/rejected page links
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epic and cool
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Conversation linking
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make conversations first class primitive of wiki, so that concepts are linked to discussion in which they are conceived
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can be as simple as citations linking to specific conversations
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uses matrix? hard part is technical challenge of implementation
Backlink fixing
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move/rename pages and update backlinks
Automatically backup videos/external sites
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like gwern, to prevent linkrot
Provide tools to make good public/private separation
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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
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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")
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and that will append that thought to the bottom of other page once i save or run tool or something (linter?)
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Smart todo aggregation system
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dokuwiki has decent one,
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zimwiki also has some good features (like hiding todo until certain date)
New types of syntax
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some syntax for assigning how sure you are of an idea, or how much you like it
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font size???!
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number of exclamation points vs question marks !!!
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First class support for sorting lists
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idk how this would work but interactive sorting is underrated!!!
Visualizers
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like roam/logseq/etc.
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but if they want to use those interactively, just use them and use wiki IR to convert wiki to them
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maybe support something simple like
WIKI LSP
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breadcrumbs (https://i.stack.imgur.com/wu4kP.png)
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definition/lookup. like you can name concepts and hover for definitions?
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autocompletion of other page names
- Open document (Hedgedoc) at https://doc.anagora.org/federatedwiki
- Video call (Jitsi) at https://meet.jit.si/federatedwiki