User:Sj/Design chats/Rewrite

Reminder: This is a wiki! Edit and refactor at will.

The cultivated person's first duty is to be always prepared to rewrite the encyclopaedia. (Eco)

Once, that meant finding a hundred thousand topics to have experts summarize onto articles to make accessible to everyone in their own language.

Now the Internet has expanded the library, and the modern library has filled out into a new encyclopedia: a compilation of works with comprehensive information on all branches of knowledge.

These are design ideas for how to restart and rescope a rewrite.

All topics, scale-free

• Any topic that has had books, chapters, articles, monographs written about it.
• Any person, registered organization (grounded in human social space)
• Any permanent structure, path, place (grounded in geographic space)
• Any species, biological structure, down to the gene and protein
• Any catalog or index or registry, of objects or creatures or concepts.
• Any environmental data archive, about the state of the world and its contents.

The practicalities may dictate where various parts are stored. Some may be exabytes on public hardware (like raw astro and geo data); some may be federations of local knowledge (like [https://www.wunderground.com/pws/overview weather station networks); in both cases summaries with links to expanded source are in the compilation.

The flow of drafts may be quite large (genealogy, personal photos, videos, iNaturalist) and need their own custom sites optimized for storing, caching, rendering, updating, and dealing with other maintenance of each class of knowledge, as gateways to the compilation.

Anyone + any system can contribute

• All sources can contribute, especially those already registered in the whole. (different from current definitions of 'any', a proper implementation of nymity is needed)
• All contributions are welcome: the act of contribution provides license release from the contributor, their additional location and device may add to community resources, and their identification and peer attestation adds to the texture of the community.
• Automated contributions warmly welcome, and needed. Contribution streams are separated by OOM of volume.
• Moderation: each stream should handle first-pass moderation of itself and slower streams. Slow inputs shouldn't be relied on to moderate fast streams.
• Meta-moderation: 2+ layers of moderation expected for most streams. If a mod task is burning people/things out, we can require the input sources to spend some extra portion of effort moderating one another, and add another layer of meta-mod to smooth it out.

Structural self-sufficiency

• Moderation, enrichment, refinement, translation, curation are all layered synthesis by the community. Everyone contributes to this, depending on need, interest, and capability.
• All tools and toolchains maintained by community. There can be any amount of support, from partnerships to staff to memberships, but all essential pieces and processes must have a community maintainer and public roadmap integrated into the collective vision for the compilation.
• A side effect of community maintenance, is integrated + collaborative refactoring, and a focus on roles vs individuals (roles of library maintenance, taskmastery of issues, roadmap maintenance, responding to needs are just that: if noone is filling the role, others can and must. No artificial delays or confusion because of absence or private variance)
• Another side effect is graceful reorganization across a wide range of budgets (in time and funds): the focus and prioritization is on how essential each part is to the whole knowledge enterprise; if it must happen it will, if it is irrelevant it shouldn't get too much attention even in flush times. Communities are structural conservers and producers of resources, while institutions and fixed posts are structural consumers of them.
• Where bounty allows, subscriptions + institutions + recurring costs get integrated into the above, but always aware of alternatives under future constraint.

Perseverance and focus

This encyclopedic compilation should start with a thousand formats.

Each format may have a thousand sources.

Each source may have thousands of entries.

Focus on the eventual goal, and iteratively scope out the most important sources of knowledge, ways to access and summarize them, ways to present and archive them.

Divide this into facets, each with a standard checklist. There will be obstacles, social and logistical, political and cultural, technical and legal. The spirit of recreation is maintaining focus on each goal, and on modest milestones towards it: persevering in finding a way past each, from scratch if need be.

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