Massive Wiki - affordances

The following is copied from a September 2023 email exchange regarding what kind of wiki to use for local, community centered information.

Massive Wiki is a good platform for this. Peter Kaminski provided some of the reasons why:

1. Accessible to more authors. Massive Wiki can be set up to be just a folder of text files on your authors' computer, that are as easy to edit or rearrange as any other text files on their computer. You can add authors by just asking them to use text files on their computer.
2. Simple syntax: Markdown is easy to learn, and a low barrier for participation.
3. Decentralized: Massive Wiki is built to diffuse information across space and time, unlike a centralized server-based wiki or website. Each author has a copy of the whole wiki, in text format. For public wikis, there's also a copy on GitHub or another public Git forge. Anyone can archive it, share it, duplicate and change it, without any infrastructure besides their computer (or even another simpler computing device, like a tablet or a USB thumb hard drive). You can zip up the whole thing easily and email the zipped-up thing to a million friends for safekeeping or further distribution, and any recipient who can receive email and unzip a file will have the whole wiki. It is much more likely to survive for decades or centuries, even if centralized networking and computing infrastructure collapses. (Maybe this is of value to you, maybe it's not. :-) )
4. Inexpensive: No monthly (centralized) server cost.

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2023-09-29: Some notes and thoughts from Bill Anderson:
/ Massive Wikis are not centralized //
/ by using Markdown and standard files and folders it is easy to get started //
/ those properties also make it easy to preserve over time //
/ the entire wiki is available to everyone; it is portable //

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