Permanent Wiki

The permanent wiki is a project to create a new form of internet publishing that balances the dynamic Fluid Nature of Wiki with the immutable permanence of the Permanent Web.

We seek to provide confidence that the material an author writes in wiki has longevity, and look to implement this by providing the following characteristics: - Your data is safe - Your data is yours

By "data" here we mean your "writing" in the broader definition of data that we use in wiki - that is the __content__ you create. This includes the text your write, the media you select, as well as the data and references you use to support your writing.

# Problems we seek to avoid

Tackling link rot and delivering a good-enough implementation of "permanence" that addresses this issue... then to deliver this functionality by providing a "publish" functionality for wiki.

Essentially what I see is the ability to publish individual pages, sets of ordered pages, or a whole site to the permanent web - that is a static HTML based site with content addressable links.

This static site would serve the federation with its minimal requirements (page json + sitemap + favicon), but "flip" the normal way wiki does this by prioritising more traditional and therefore permanent storage formats that can be viewed simply and meaningfully in the browser.

The JSON would then either be supplied dynamically, or rendered statically as an additional output.

This "publish archive" together with docker based storage, and the work done on asset management - but also link it to github and static site generation. This would create a docker based wiki farm with built in permanent web archiving that would / could work in a federated way if we use round robin DNS - but also allow the sites to be published / stored on GitHub as static sites.

# History

The Permanent Wiki is a project that I have been working towards for several years now.

It started when I was working on building the Architectonic Archive together with the architect Lena Nalbach, and more recently led to working with the InterPlantery File System and FedWiki in terms of implementation.

As of 2017 the project has a new home - permanent.wiki