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 (https://i.stack.imgur.com/wu4kP.png)

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

• autocompletion of other page names