The WikiGround project aims to provide a free and open source platform for mapping resources to the natural landscape, and to do this without the confusion of contrived administrative boundaries. The project will use hierarchical watershed boundaries that have been derived from topography and from the natural occurrence of rivers. This provides us with a robust set of hierarchical geographic divisions from the continental scale down to the scale of counties and towns, and it does so in a way that keeps the immutable flows and cycles of some of our planet's most vital natural resources in the forefront of our attention.

To start, the primary focus will be on food resources; staples, produce, products, ingredients, and the many sites from which they're sourced. If you can imagine, this will be an immense and highly responsive dataset reflecting changes in weather, seasons, supply lines, consumer tastes any many other factors. A dataset like this can only be achieved as a collective effort between many distributed users. For this reason, the site will use MediaWiki with Semantic MediaWiki, and it will be designed for adoption by communities that already exist around food co-ops, community-supported agriculture projects (CSA), farmers markets, and other community projects where food quality, food sovereignty, health and local self-sufficiency are common values. In this sense, WikiGround is a tool for facilitating and compounding data volunteered by distributed, local food experts and contextualizing it into a visual/conceptual framework (the watershed system). By doing this, we gain a powerful overview of our food resource economies and a better understanding of how these economies extend from our planets natural ecology.

Traditionally, MediaWiki has not avoided many of the problems and constraints inherent to centralization. Wikipedia, for example, is an outstanding instance of MediaWiki software being used effectively to bring together contributions from disparate users from across languages and around the world. Nonetheless, it relies on the authority of a set of central servers, and it defers to the authority of a centralized organization (i.e. the Wikimedia Foundation) to operate those servers and manage policy.

This centralization can be avoided by adopting a shared semantic vocabulary to allow independent (e.g. federated) MediaWiki projects to mutually host and publish each other's data. This could be thought of as something like a semantically robust RSS feed through which sites may subscribe to and re-host, or mirror, the user-contributions of other sites. However, it is important to note that RSS is premised on the assumption of centralized Internet Protocol framework. In this traditional system, the authority and trustworthiness of a given site, or feed, stems from its ICANN-validated URL (e.g. https://www.nytimes.com, or in the case of non-RSS wikis, https://www.wikipedia.org). A properly distributed MediaWiki site must move away from the historic dependencies of Location-Based IP Addressing, towards newer protocol for Content-Bases Addressing.

The aim for the Wikiground Watershed Food Resource Mapping project is to utilize IPFS content-based addressing conventions as a means of publishing semantically confluent data assertions between independent MediaWiki-based sites. By adopting this practice, independent community MediaWiki hubs may publish and ingest each other's datasets safely and reliably with complete indifference as to how the data is transferred. A transfer might utilize standard IP requests via a HTTP request to another hub's URL, or it might connect directly to a site's IP address over FTP. Conversely a hub might use the main IPFS peer network to "pin" and retrieve data from other hubs. Further, because IPFS is built on secure cryptographic identification of both users (peer IDs) and data (content ID, or CID), transfers can be made via "sneakernet", e.g. by physically mailing drives.

With this methodology, it becomes increasingly clear that the important constraints to communication are not economic, but rather physical and ecological. This begs exploration of the physical properties of our natural environment, the diverse channels of communication our environment affords, and perhaps also an open mind as to the ecological significance already present in the discursive currents of our natural environment.

Everyone is welcome to get involved with this project! Email to get in touch. GitHub links and other resources will be provided soon.