Blog

We at the Knowledge Standards Foundation speak about an “encyclopedia network” and about “standards” for the entire network architecture. And it probably is a good idea to be thinking about that. But, having explored a number of different attempts to decentralize social media, I have come around to a simple...

The Knowledge Standards Foundation has a lot of news, in approximately chronological order: After a casual call for donations on Twitter last fall, Foundation President Larry Sanger managed to find our first significant donation, $100,000 plus legal expenses paid. We soon thereafter restarted organizing things in the Slack group. Larry...

It is proposed that the article format be XML-based with a combination of custom elements and RDF inspired attributes. HTML might initially seem like a good option due to its broad usage and familiarity, however HTML is not semantic in origin. Attempting to extract meaning from generic HTML is an...

This is intended to be an example of the activities that the encyclosphere standards and protocols should support. It follows on from user story 1, which introduces “sciepedia.org”, a hypothetical online science encyclopedia. Kevin is a regular user of sciepedia.org, and has contributed to a number of articles on the...

In order to identify the requirements for an encyclosphere protocol, here’s a sketch of how one user might use one online encyclopedia one day. Nothing about this is prescriptive, it’s just an example of how it might work. Jane, sciepedia.org and altiepedia.com are fictional Story A user “Jane” wants to...

I don’t think we have a clear shared idea of just what an online encyclopedia within the Encyclosphere would look like. Mostly, that’s a good thing. We’re not trying to build an encyclopedia, we’re trying to enable a multitude of encyclopedias, and they won’t all have the same form of...

The goal of KSF is to provide protocols for online encyclopedias. Top-level, this means How to publish an article How to read a published article How to search published articles How to apply a rating of some kind to an article Some of this is at the level of transports...

Love them or hate them, bots are a fact of life on the internet today. Some bots are useful, they can fetch and provide a link to an article on a topic mentioned in a post. Some bots are funny. There was one, an RMS bot, which would appear and...

I wanted to start a discussion about software licencing used for the Encyclosphere project. I think the whole project should run on Free software. If somebody finds some non-Free code used, it should be flagged as a bug and an alternative sought. I shall provide two examples below of what...

People usually think all that the loudspeakers play are k-pop songs and downright propaganda. If you look more into it, the loudspeakers are a carefully crafted psychological warfare. The initial announcements start with weather reports. Accurate weather reports that the NK neither has the manpower nor the computing power to...

Here’s a homemade video of the first speech about the Encyclosphere and KSF: Here’s one of the diagrams used in the video:

This is the text of a speech Larry Sanger gave about the Encyclosphere and the Knowledge Standards Foundation, October 17, 2019, at TheNextWeb’s Hard Fork Summit in Amsterdam. For now, you can go to Encyclosphere.org to sign up for news of the project. We’ll also give you opportunities to get...

In this post I’m going to share some organizational plans and solicit advice about them. We have two main tasks/goals in the next few weeks: (1) organize volunteers into active, more or less self-managing groups, (2) launch this blog, and (3) apply for 501(c)(3) status. That should be enough to...

Announcements of new Internet initiatives activate a whole set of concepts and their accompanying questions: What’s the team? Who are the investors? What’s the product called? How does the app work? What differentiates it from the competition? When does it launch? Few of these questions is appropriate to the Knowledge...

In this post, I want to break down the basic technology of the Encyclosphere—but bear in mind this is more of a proposal for review than a finished concept. Bear also in mind that “Introducing the Encyclosphere” is a better source for general reflections about the Encyclosphere and how the...

Overview: I suggest we start with Mediawiki as a base to avoid reimplementing the wheel, that our major change is to add federation and some thoughts on major styles for doing that, a couple initial thoughts on how the “ratings” / editorial system might work, and then a miscellaneous grab...

From Patrick Durusau— Quick post to say hello! Most relevant background, standards editing ISO 26300 OpenDocument Format (ODF TC at OASIS, https://www.oasis-open.org/committees/tc_home.php?wg_abbrev=office), ISO 13250-5 Topic Maps – Reference Model, OASIS Technical Advisory Board (TAB, review of work products). Topic maps enable the collocation of information about a subject, a collocation...

Folks, please give us general feedback to this site. A lot will be fixed and there are many issues already being tracked, but more general reflections on this site, that aren’t (necessarily, just) “issues” would be most welcome. Thanks in advance! Of course, if you do have bugs/fix requests to...

100% on board with this mission, which is very close to my heart. 1. Regarding ratings All ratings are manipulated. In 2015, Reddit accidentally revealed its users are being manipulated. The #1 entry under “Most Addicted Cities” on this now-deleted blog post is Eglin Air Force Base, a major hub...

Executive Summary After ten years of domination by big social media—which might finally be in decline—we are tired of giant Silicon Valley corporations using us contemptuously. We still remember an Internet in which we charted our own destiny. The encyclosphere will be the universal network of encyclopedias—an ownerless, leaderless, centerless...