Wiki Engine as Node - Ecologically Distributed Network

[SilliamBims]

General Description

This is a proposal for the reimagination of wiki engine software for use with off-chain distributed networks. As present cryptographic techniques have made it possible to communicate data securely without reference to legacy centralized authorities, new communities with new assumptions about the bare requirements of communication are needed to fully realize the potential of organically distributed networking. I propose that software modeled after wiki engines, which have a proven record of supporting diverse knowledge-management practices, would be an excellent way to gain critical user momentum, and subsequently, to achieve more dedicated and robust participation on IPFS-IPLD networks.

The aim of the project is to ease the transition from centrally accountable data/information/knowledge practices, to distributed practices that are open, transparent, flexible and participatory. The software should provide an intuitive and user-friendly interface for the collaborative creation and management of data that is semantically rich, queryable, extensible and secure. It should be suitable for technical and non-technical users alike and serve in all respects to encourage the local stewardship of data, knowledge and culture.

At the same time, the software should facilitate IPFS node functionality by providing users with a clear and simple way to view, manage and pin data for distributed network access. This should be possible regardless of whether this data pertains to assets, single pages, user profiles, collections, namespaces, or even entire wiki databases. This is the substantial point of departure from the functionality and use value of traditional wiki engines. It should also be capable of supporting any metadata standards or controlled vocabularies, and allow users to create and version standards of their own. This modularity of formally explicit data can be achieved through IPLD by building on techniques for embedded semantics and provenance being developed by the Underlay project.

Subsequently, both this proposal and The Underlay project could be developed symbiotically. Whereas the Underlay is committed to democratizing ownership and access to the large majority of machine-readable data that runs our digital world, this proposal for distributed wiki software is concerned explicitly with cultivating and safeguarding registers for human-readable data to be built on top of that. This means assuring that an ecologically proportionate degree of conscious human participation remains endemic to the flows of our distributed datascape.

To riff on the visual metaphor of Wikipedia’s jigsaw puzzle globe, where the surface of the earth is an unfinished puzzle being filled in by user-contributed pieces, we might instead imagine a living puzzle, where those pieces grow like cells – not from a center or edge, but in between, above and below each other, like bark on a tree or moss on that bark (or users on a planet.) In this way, the Merkle forests we draw inherit something of the vitality and wily effervescence of the forests of our physical world.

This is just a preliminary statement to spark discussion, so please share your thoughts!