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2025-10-20; some edits 2025-11-20
In this piece, I propose various types or kinds of wiki page in a knowledge commons serving the commons more generally. (I do not mean the subject categories, which are quite a different story.) I'm proposing these both to make it easier for readers to understand the kinds of things they are reading about, in a way that I hope is pretty universal across cultures. If we can agree some universal categories like this, it will then help towards the long-term goal of creating effective distributed wiki systems.
Separately, the following post looks at the internal structure of the pages in this wiki, on the assumption that we will be using a wiki, which has separate pages, each with their own URL (which can be noted, copied, passed around).
For want of a better way to point to the kinds of thing that are important to a commons, I'll reiterate a very common definition of a commons from David Bollier, echoed by many others. A commons is, to quote Bollier,
“a resource plus a defined community and the protocols, values and norms devised by the community to manage its resources.”
I'll mix in ideas from Elinor Ostrom, as appropriate.
To help readability, I will first just list the kinds of page I envisage, and then I'll outline the typical attributes and relationships of each kind of page, along with the connections with schemas from other systems, and why I'm promoting their inclusion in a knowledge commons about commons. This is important, as I am careful to justify each choice.
A page could hold information about:
And separately, there could be pages for landing, orientation or navigation, suitable for diverse people with their different backgrounds. So let's now look as these different kinds of page, and the relationships between the entities they represent.
These are the “resources” referred to in many definitions of the commons, so any knowledge commons about commons must represent them. REA accounting has the resources of Resources, Events, Agents. But care is needed with the word “resource”, because it is too easily misunderstood as referring only to use value and nothing else. Commons and bioregional people are generally aware of these issues. We don't just “use” the resources of the bioregion or commons, we want to care for them, be their stewards, guardians or managers, and appreciate their intrinsic worth, as well as using them.
Just to give a few examples of the kinds of “resource” that are of interest to commons, and could be commoned:
These examples of resources are “rivalrous” and “depletable” – that is, they can be used up, consumed, killed, destroyed, spoiled – and as they are limited, the more some people use up, the less there are for others. We can have knowledge about actual, specific resources, that exist in specific places, and which may have time boundaries. If they constitute commons, they are managed by specific groups of people. Specific resources have a history, however well known it is. Particular, specific resources can also be categorised into different types, and a type of resource is a generic concept, with no specific time or place. We want our knowledge commons to represent this generic knowledge about types of resource, as well as specific knowledge about instances.
Immaterial resources are somewhat different. To illustrate the difference, consider books, which can be seen both as material and immaterial. As material resources, books can be held in libraries, and their use can be shared. We could easily imagine a community owned library as a book commons. However, the actual value in books is generally, for non-fiction books, the information, knowledge etc. contained in them, and that can be copied independently of how they are embodied physically. The same goes for musical works: the music exists beyond the various performances of it, or the scores that denote it. That is quite different from depletable resources. Works of fiction are stories, and they have value in different ways. But again the work itself is not the same kind of things as its realisation or embodiment.1)
“Thing” is a term even more general than “resource”, used in schema.org, but it also includes Event, Person, and Place, which we will be looking at separately.
A concept is immaterial, for sure, but is it a “resource”? I think not, on balance. Concepts are important, because they are used in different contexts, and form one of the links between other pages in the wiki. And they are particularly important for learning. Many things can only be understood along with understanding the concepts that are used to describe them — the terms we use for concepts serve as the language we use to describe many other things: specific instances of resources; stories; patterns; questions. So, the way that a concept wiki page can work is to have one or more definitions, perhaps in terms of other, simpler concepts. You could imagine the index to a textbook, pointing not only to places where a term is defined, but also places where it is used. In a wiki, that can be done with very little effort, simply by linking the term from the most significant places it appears: the backlinks serve as pointers in the index.
As well as questions using concepts, questions can be about concepts. Respectful talking around definitions should lead to agreements about how terms are used in the knowledge commons. Also, it would be very useful to have common agreement around when a term is “just” a concept, and when it is complex enough to be classed as a pattern — patterns generally relate concepts together.
People are essential to any commons. They may relate to the other things that are represented as pages, at least as follows.
Unsurprisingly, people turn up everywhere in published ontology schemes, including one of the most general, schema.org.
From the perspective of commoned knowledge, people can be contributors to, curators of, readers of, or learners about that knowledge. But as well as the people who have direct interaction with the knowledge commons, there are other relevant people, for instance those who have or had knowledge about commons, or may have written books about commons.
So, I suggest, it is worth having a wiki page for each person: contributors can write their own, like user pages in Wikipedia, and it is clearly useful to have a page about particular people like Elinor Ostrom, curated by the knowledge commons members.
All cultures recognise people, though the balance of importance between individuals and groups does vary.
Commons are used, managed, stewarded, or whatever by a group of people who we generally call “commoners”. Ostrom emphasised the need for clear boundaries around group membership, and this is true also for knowledge commons. If this kind of group of commoners has a defined legal structure, it is easy to represent as a group. Also, I would say, even if the group is informal, provided they are in good communication and relationship, and if they are curating a part of the knowledge commons, it might be useful for them to give themselves a name, and have their own page.
Other groups that we may want to describe include families, cultures, civilizations, clans, tribes, nations. If their practice included commons and commoning, then they may well be worth noting in a knowledge commons about commons.
In particular instances of material commons, the resources are generally located in a place. The commoner people may live nearby, too. This place could be defined in several ways. Political or administrative units may or may not be significant to commons, but if they are, it could be useful to give those places their own page, so that the different commons in a place can be related.
Natural and traditional, rather than political, divisions of place may also be relevant to commons. Bioregions will have their own species or populations of living things, and plants and animals (domestic or wild) within a particular area may be stewarded as commons. Cultural or linguistic regions may be significant in that culture and language may affect the way that people can associate around commons. Again, it could well be useful for commoners to know who else is commoning in their bioregion or other region.
Everyone relates to place in one or more ways, as space is a universal characteristic of our experience. It may be worth emphasising that in many indigenous traditions, place is more personal and special than in modern “western” culture. In particular, places may be held as sacred, which limits what is allowed in that place for that culture, and that calls for sensitivity and respect from people who have not assimilated that culture. Thus, it is even more important that place is explicitly represented in knowledge commons generally.
I'm using the term “gathering” here rather than “event” (the schema.org term), as “event” is more ambiguous in English. Here, what I mean is the kind of event like a council, a conference, a meeting, a festival, a party, a training, a residency, etc., and these could be relevant to a knowledge commons inasmuch as their subject is commons or commoning, or that they practice commoning of knowledge or other resources. People organise, as well as attend, gatherings. There may be defined organisations involved in organising gatherings; and sometimes gatherings are only open to members of a particular organisation.
Among the uses of commons-oriented knowledge commons, they could serve to hold information about upcoming commons events and to disseminate outcomes from past events. It may be useful for someone to know who else attended a commons-related gathering, or who else is planning to participate in a future one.
Gatherings can be significant for sharing the kind of knowledge that goes into a knowledge commons; thus, some knowledge can be linked back to the gathering at which it was featured, composed, or extended. Gatherings may well have an overall guiding question, and it may be the kind of question that merits its own page.
I cannot think of any culture that does not have some kind of relevant and significant gathering.
Stories are so pervasive that they can easily be overlooked as proper elements in a knowledge commons. Essentially, a story is a narrative either about what has happened, or about what might happen in the future, or might have happened in the past, either in the real world or in some imaginal or mythological world. Stories about commons are vital for conveying both real lived experience and cultural beliefs and values. There will never be just one story about a commons, a gathering, a place, a resource, a group, or even a person (a biography), but several, from different perspectives, with different focus or emphasis. Myths, fairy tales, etc. may also be valuable stories expressing culture and values. Either way, if the histories, the stories, the myths include commons and commoning, then we may want to point to the stories in a knowledge commons.
Stories may be particularly important within traditional cultures, where that culture's wisdom is communicated through story and myth. This kind of story doesn't have named identifiable authors, but is the product of cultural refinement over time. Traditional stories may be associated with particular storytellers – “the story as told by …” – though many other stories do have specific people as authors.
Stories about bioregions, commons and commoning can be a powerful influence on people's support for, enthusiasm about, or willingness to participate in commons and commoning, or to think in terms of bioregions. Thus, they surely belong as part of the knowledge that supports commons.
David Bollier and Silke Helfrich (notable enough people to have their own pages in Wikipedia, as well as being significant for commons) edited a collection, “Patterns of Commoning” (significant immaterial resource), the first part of which is all about patterns in the sense championed by Christopher Alexander in A Pattern Language. Several of the conversations I have had around commons have included a mention of this concept of patterns.
In the BKC group, the current intention is to look at bioregioning practices, and find patterns within those. In the GtC group, there is already a keen awareness of pattern language, and patterns are envisaged as being represented in our knowledge commons. The current idea is that a pattern of commoning is a pattern that emerges from the experience of commoning, that is likely to be applicable to different situations, not just one specific one. That is, it is reusable. But patterns are not hard and fast rules. They are more like guidelines, in this case, to help people design and run successful commons. They need to be evaluated and adapted to context.
It is not yet clear just how we will represent patterns, in terms of their relationships with other patterns and with different entities. But one guess is that a pattern involves a number of concepts — that is, a pattern is not just a primitive concept by itself, but a combination. The article by Helmut Leitner in the collection “Patterns of Commoning” gives three sets of attributes for patterns,2) and they all contain some version of a context, a problem and a solution. The “problem” (or “challenge”) could easily be represented as a question, as immediately follows here. The following chapter by Silke Helfrich gives an even more detailed account, including some definite suggestions of a few patterns of commoning.
Recall that all the contemporary writers stress that the set of rules, conventions, practices etc. which the commoners agree to, practice and uphold is an integral part of the commons, and setting up and maintaining agreement around those rules, and related sanctions, is an essential part of commoning. This makes it feel right to have such rules in a knowledge commons serving the commons in general. But what are those rule sets? They are clearly not person, group, place, gathering, story or question. Are they a resource or a pattern then? My suggestion is that a specific set of rules is an immaterial resource, governed by the commoners who agree to be bound by those rules; while any generalisations from particular rules may best be represented as patterns.
Added on 2025-11-04:
On later reflection, there's a need to add Practice as a separate, though related, type of page. Please go there to read more about practices and patterns.
I don't know of any existing knowledge commons, or related wiki, which gives questions the salience of having their own pages. But I do believe it is very important to have these, as questions have much power, and represent the growing edge of knowledge.
Questions arise as important to our knowledge commons, in that we don't know everything, and there are unresolved questions to do with commons and commoning (or any topic, for that matter) for which we have no definite answers. However, some caution is needed about representing questions with their own pages. We don't want everyone to create a page for their own personal questions, as this would both flood and confuse people. Personal, specific questions can be raised, discussed and answered better on a forum than on a wiki. But if several people find a good question that is unanswered, of interest to more than a few people, and is generative of new ideas, then giving that question its own page can be a way of relating it to interested people; to projects exploring it; to suggested solutions; and to patterns. Elaborating questions through dialogue is one good reason for having a forum linked to a knowledge commons wiki.
Contributors to the wiki can give their opinion on answers to questions in a commentary section, which will be covered in the following piece, dealing with the structure within single pages.
There are a few important attributes that could well serve as a useful part of the ontology of commons, and therefore of knowledge commons around commons and bioregions, but do not merit their own page on this kind of wiki, as having a page would add little value and likely be far too many in number to be manageable or helpful.
These considerations suggest considering linking a knowledge commons wiki together with maps, calendars or accounting systems, as may be appropriate.
I continue on 2025-10-21 with looking at the internal structure of wiki pages, and on 2025-11-04 with further reflections on types of page
A revised version of this piece was published on the Growing the Commons Blog