if we want to support a living knowledge commons. This relates to my theme on connecting useful knowledge.

(Material first written by Simon Grant, December 2020. If you want to help develop this, please e-mail me.)

(transcribed and adapted for DokuWiki, April 2022)

Start with the an introduction — my list of requirements follows below, each elaborated on a separate page.

• a powerful, semi-automatic cross-domain backlinking system — existing wikis do backlinks, but only within their own instance
• semantic links — very few wikis do this well
• metadata separation from page content — this is currently confused
• no categories; these are unnecessarily confusing — just have normal pages
• access control — some but not all wikis do this
• edit history and reversion — widely implemented already
• basic web compatibility — not consistently done
• decent options for straightforward editing

• federated user browsing history — not just for one site or session
• graphical rendering of page graph — because many people find this helpful
• semantic search — to tie in with other semantic web tools
• change notification — picking up a common feature of blogs
• persistent author attribution — the better to know collaborators
• small, controlled page class vocabulary — for easier learnability

• drag and drop across sites — extending a feature of Fedwiki
• commenting and suggesting — emulating Google Docs and others
• fine-grained change indication
• search and replace across the whole wiki content, or selected subspaces

Here's a list of links to the wikis I've looked at. They may of course have developed further since I looked.

• MediaWiki
• DokuWiki (the software used right here)
• Fedwiki
• Massive Wiki

Here is a template for adding other requirements.

If you are interested in collaborating on this, please let me know and I will give you access to this whole wiki-related part of my wiki.

Please add right here any links to articles that cover the same or very similar ground to here.

• Straightforward https for latest version of page content along with last revision date
• More detailed history etc. given in response to a request for overall metadata about page.
• “give me that page as it was at this date-time”
• preserved in  (but how demarcated? just characters?); also with date-time of last change within that portion

• Look up Topic Maps in case that helps
• Related talk on Hylo and subsequent ideas.
• Interesting Holochain development.