Okay, so, KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT! What do you think of? I think of Wiki software primarily. But also books, notebooks, mindmaps, blogs, RSS/Atom feeds, databases, office software, even runes come to mind.
How do we best manage the knowledge that we have? A significant amount of the knowledge that is shared within this community relates to nanonyimity, or the "orange pill". This information can be useful to look back on, both for ourselves who know it and others who could use it.
So far, we use a very hap-hazard approach to sharing this knowledge.
We answer questions primarily in various splintered XMPP MUCs that have devolved evolved over the course of a long time, but sometimes also in Email.
There was originally some knowledge shared on the now not updated (but still could be) Spyware Watchdog website (raw XHTML). There was the short lived Geneticabhorrence website (raw HTML). The Digdeeper website most of all (which uses raw XHTML).
There was the attempt at something more with ShadowWiki and NAMAC, however this did not catch on (more on that in a bit).
Some other attempts from outside the community (but are still privacy/security-related) include the InstallGentooWiki, which uses MediaWiki to serve it's content, or maybe TheNewOil and Madaidan which each use their own format (Madaidan is stored using git), even Michael Bazzell's works (book & PDF).
While this is not to suggest that there should ever only be one medium of listing knowledge, I do think maybe we can do a little bit better.
Let's start by listing some options and their various advantages and shortcomings.
Raw (X)HTML :
This is the most obvious and nearly the simplest of all the options. It is quite simple to write, themeing is easy with CSS, most people already use it and know it. The Digdeeper and SWD sites already use it. However, as you need to add more and more content the tedious issues start to appear. First, there's standardization in formatting. Getting everyone to make it look the same is a hassle, one person might throw a div over there when it's supposed to be over here! Then you gotta have regular cleanups (that no one else knows how to do). Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, you have issues with repeating and organizing content. There is no automation to help you with this. There is no built in bibliography/webography manager at all. If you want perfect, ordered lines of bib then be prepared to do 100% of those 100+ (or even more if it's a larger page) citations and footnotes yourself. Need a new one in the middle? Well that new is now 53, and the other 47 are gonna need to be changed a value. Every. Single. Time. On top of this, if you have information stored in one (or more) other webpages, that you wish to re-use said data on the current one you are editing, your only option is to copy and paste. I believe this solution is great for simple projects but is not capable of thoroughly "managing knowledge". Next option!
SSMs: Static Site Generators are quite awesome and there are many of them. If it could run cross platform, and have web-enabled editing, this would theoretically be the best option (note: that you can still pair any SSM with a VCS). There are tons of them out there, but let's just focus on a few.
HSC, or "HTML Sucks Completely" was one of the (or the?) first one. While I have never used it, the description indicates it offers macros, commands, and include files. Unclear how these "include files" can be formatted. I see no mention of querying. A interesting starting point, but perhaps not really focused towards what we are looking for.
IkiWiki, An SSM focused on Wikis. Has a bib plugin. Does not seem to mention much in the way of semantics or querying however.
NAMAC, I guess this fits here. NAMAC solved some basic issues, and is still currently in use at the ShadowWiki. It added an (albeit custom format) webography system, and a semi-automatic nav generation, and some macros for the most commonly repeated tasks. The syntax made little sense however, and there was no including feature let alone self-querying or web editing.
Note Taking Applications: I won't spend much time here, as the options are few. It is a fuzzy line between a note taking app and a wiki, several "note taking" apps allow you to export as a wiki or have wiki in the name, SUCH AS -
Obsidian with the https://obsidian.rocks/dataview-in-obsidian-a-beginners-guide/ Can be exported in several ways, including (it claims) directly as a wiki. Possibly very bloated however? It appears non of the suggested example sites work without JS enabled.
ZimWiki Pretty much out of scope in general, but it exists.
Roff, Troff, Groff and Nroff: Also Utroff. Has the absolute best platform support. Pretty much every system you can run some form of troff on it. It can be converted into XHTML, however this can get difficult when you try to apply CSS or any sort of consisentcy within the given site other than just random HTML files all over the place. Primarily it is designed as a typesetter for PDF/EPUB type stuff, where printing to paper or making man pages is the goal. Bibliography can be handled with the refer program, so that's covered. There's also https://github.com/pjfichet/tsql which would let you store information in an SQLite DB for extracting. The main issue is a lack of focus on site or wiki generation, but it's got "universality" covered in spades. Also it can't really query itself to my knowledge, so there's that.
LaTeX: Seemingly able to do everything, but runs into some similar issues as troff in that it is primarily for type setting not website generation. However there's LaTeX extensions for just about everything, not sure how well it would all work.
RMD: R markdown. Looses the platform universality (and by that I mean idk if it works on AIX or Amiga systems), but gains HTML as not being an after thought. Designed specifically to process data, it can do anything. In fact, it is a markdown within a programming language. A solid option actually. Could pretty much do anything.
MediaWiki with Semantic MediaWiki extension: Probably the best example of something doing everything. See their some of their examples. Does EXACTLY what I am talking about. Only issue is reliance on PHP and JavaScript. How would you contribute if you were using, say, plan9? While pages will display without JS, I think it should welcome all contributors as well. The US DOD uses this supposedly.
Fossil: Fossil is a version control system and web interface that comes with wiki software built in. It displays and mostly works without JS (though I'm not sure about editing). If the web interface was an issue, you could simply clone the repo and edit locally. However beyond this it has very limited wiki-related features.
Other Wiki Software: There's lots of other wiki software, which I might include in a separate post, however none of them come even close to the needed features.
XHTML+RDFa This is apparently a W3C recommendation. However, documentation on actually using it is scant. The RDFa combined into the XHTML would make the documents very easy to query, however it is unclear if any of the querying solutions can work in an offline manner, not requiring an "end point".
DBs: A database could instead be used to store all repeatable knowledge (ie information like city, DOB, platforms, license etc) and then said database could just be queried over and over and magically converted into XHTML, GemText or whatever and used.
BaseX: XML based, can take Xqueries.
The various primarily SQL DBs (SQLite, MariaDB, PostgreSQL).
IBM Db2: Not sure why it would be used, but hey, IBM!
OpenLink Virtuoso and Apache Jena: Both are SPARQL "end points". I think Virtuoso can take queries of any kind. You can use Virtuoso as a backend for Semantic MediaWiki. Documentation and user interface appears rather confusing.
Zotero with LibreOffice Base and LibreOffice Writer: You can use Zoetero inside Writer. This would help with all your bookmarking/bib stuff. Then, you can make tables or DBs in Calc or Base, then import them however you see fit in any document, and then export to whatever format you want. However, it's unclear how well Writer does with website creation, as it is primarily an office suite.
So which option is best? Have you tried any of them? Have some opinions or experience? Are there more options out there, like some as of yet unknown to me Vim configuration? Think more testing should be done because I clearly don't what I am talking about? AM I MISSING SOMETHING?????????
Well let's discuss. What features would you like to see? What software would you be most likely to use in contributing?
, so I imagine a small VPS should be able to handle it fine? Typemill was relatively simple to install/use and made some of the "tedious issues" bearable.