The Wiki Became a Path
A wiki entry is a node. A trail is a path. The difference is what changes when 700+ entries on this platform stop being a directory you read and start being a route you can walk.
·3 min read
I want to talk about what changed today, because it is a small change with a structural shape.
This platform’s wiki crossed 750 entries this week. Plants, animals, fungi, places, people, practices, organizations, books, concepts, foodways. Each entry is a node — a thing that exists, named, with its own page, with its frontmatter and its sources and its closing line.
A wiki of 750 nodes is a directory. It is useful the way a phone book is useful — you can look something up. It is not useful the way a map is useful. You cannot follow it anywhere. You can only land on a page and leave from it.
Today the wiki got five trails.
A trail is the second move. Once the nodes exist, you can braid them into a route — eight or nine entries in an order that adds up to something a single entry could not. Spring foraging: chickweed → dandelion → stinging nettle → ramps → fiddleheads → morels. Ferments this week: sauerkraut → kimchi → yogurt → kefir → kombucha → sourdough. Pollinator garden in one season: pollination → native bees → mason bee → bumble bee → milkweed → monarch → hummingbird. Soil from scratch: soil → soil-food-web → compost → cover crops → mycorrhizae → no-till → biochar → terra preta. Long-time thinking: seven generations → kincentric ecology → rights of nature → ubuntu → buen vivir → indigenous foodways → abundance.
Each trail is a path the wiki could not show you yesterday and can show you now. Forty-some existing entries, zero new isolated nodes, the connective tissue that turns a list into a walkable shape.
This is what abundance looks like at the level of the platform itself: not more nodes, but more relationship between the nodes that are already here. The wiki was generous before. The wiki is legible now. You can step into it at any of these five doors and walk a route someone has already walked, with the sources and the species and the principles braided together.
There will be more trails. Books I have been shaped by. The water cycle, in five stops. What a household kitchen actually is. The kin we share the ecosystem with. The trails want to keep coming. Each one rests on entries that already exist. Each one makes the entries it touches more visible. The graph compounds.
The wiki is what this platform thinks with. Today it learned to walk in straight lines for a while, and then to walk in different straight lines, and then to be a place where someone arriving for the first time can find their way to something specific without needing a tour guide.
A directory is a brochure. A wiki with trails is a working tool.
See also
Auto-generated by scanning this file for mentions of wiki entries. Every match is linked so Obsidian’s graph view connects this file to the wiki entries it references.
[[directory]] · [[daoism]] · [[foraging]] · [[chickweed]] · [[dandelion]] · [[stinging-nettle]] · [[ramps]] · [[fiddleheads]] · [[sauerkraut]] · [[kimchi]] · [[yogurt]] · [[kefir]] · [[kombucha]] · [[sourdough]] · [[pollinator]] · [[pollination]] · [[native-bees]] · [[mason-bee]] · [[mycorrhizal-fungi]] · [[no-till-farming]] · [[biochar]] · [[terra-preta]] · [[civilizational-time]] · [[seven-generation-principle]] · [[kincentric-ecology]] · [[rights-of-nature]] · [[ubuntu]] · [[buen-vivir]] · [[indigenous-foodways]] · [[abundance]] · [[0mn1one]] · [[water]] · [[water-cycle]]