P2P Wiki × Portico
45,559 pages · addressable

A wiki you read, or a corpus you can work with

The P2P Foundation wiki has been accumulating the commons literature since 2006. Behind a gateway it stops being a pile of pages to search and becomes something you can regroup by lens, hold a subset of without copying, re-view at any level of detail, and — crucially — build on without laundering away where the claims came from.

Start at §1 The wiki ↗
§1 — INGEST · A PAGE BECOMES A HOLON

Nothing is thrown away on the way in

An article arrives as MediaWiki markup and leaves as an addressable document: de-marked-up, split on its own headings, and stamped with where it came from, who wrote it and what licence it carries. That stamp is the part that matters later — it is what lets a synthesis three steps downstream still say whose work it rests on.

§2 — REGROUP · NINE LENSES OVER FREE-FORM CATEGORIES

Same corpus, someone else's order

MediaWiki categories are whatever editors typed over twenty years. Michel Bauwens' reading-room presort is a different order over the same articles — nine lenses, "same vision, different lens". It is applied as a map, not a migration: nothing is moved, an article can sit under several lenses at once, and one searchable corpus replaces nine siloed ones.

click any lens to read its members
§3 — RETRIEVE · TWO RETRIEVERS THAT FAIL DIFFERENTLY

The documents worth recovering are the ones only one of them found

Keyword search and vector search have different blind spots, so the gateway runs both and takes the union — an intersection would return only what they already agreed on, which is exactly the set that needed no help. Their scores are never averaged: BM25 is unbounded and cosine lives in [-1,1], so each candidate keeps its origin and its rank, and only the ranks are fused.

§4 — SUBSET · HOLD YOUR ORGANIZATION, NOT THE CONTENT

A reading list that never copies the reading

A group wants its own shelf: these forty articles, our tags, our review dates, our order. An overlay gives them exactly that and nothing more — every entry is a pointer upstream plus the group's own metadata, and the body slot stays empty by construction. Not as a storage optimisation: a body you persisted is a fork you now have to maintain, and a licence you now have to honour.

click articles in the left column to shelve them

What the overlay stores

What it points at

§5 — RE-VIEW · BANDS AND FORMS

One query, however much of the answer you can actually use

A map needs a dot, a list needs a line, a reader needs the document. Asking the same corpus three times and throwing away what you did not need is three times the disclosure for one answer. A band says how much to reveal — and the charge follows the band actually served, not the one requested, so a caller downgraded to a smaller rung is told, and billed for what they really got.

Requested form → what you get

Degradation ladder

§6 — GROUND & DERIVE · WHAT YOU MAY CLAIM

A shaky secondary must not become a confident tertiary

The answer below is real: a local model, the sources it was actually given, no editing. Every sentence is then checked back against those sources, and the ones the sources do not carry are marked rather than quietly shipped. Anything derived from this inherits a licence computed from its sources and a confidence that cannot go up — because prose quality is uncorrelated with evidential strength, and a reader downstream has no way to tell them apart.

what this is and is not

Honest edges