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Message #00000
day 1
Hello and welcome!
Saturday February 9, 2013 begins the launch of my magnum opus, a new
wiki whose page content is written in any domain-specific language, and
whose content is decentralized both internally and externally.
I offer this project, my greatest idea borne from years of planning and
thinking, with excitement and hope, freely to the world. The GNU Affero
GPL v3 license was chosen so that it remains free (1), and because it is
likely to be run over a network (2).
This wiki seeks to solve many problems and shortcomings traditional
wikis face, along with solving problems we aren't even aware that exist
yet, by means of a very simple set of principles and architectural
constraints. The architecture of the wiki will be two simple ideas:
domain-specific languages and decentralization. Upon these everything
will be built.
Instead of layering more and more upon a weak foundation, the idea is to
remove and remove everything until you have a minimal core from which
anything can be built.
An early idea is to first lay down a bootstrap instance of the wiki,
then develop this wiki using itself. To get started, let's lay down a
few prototypes to see what patterns emerge that is best, and pick which
one has the most promise to carry things forward, supporting only a few
simple DSLs (3). Of course, wiki markup is already a default DSL, so
that might be first.
The logo for Winterize is a snowflake, a crystalline formation, a
metaphor for how information can combined into marvelous unique
structures, based on multiple sources and combined into unexpected new
forms using only very simple bonds.
I am dedicated to the future of this project, and commit myself to its
success. Now let's go and change the world!
--Max Polk
(1) http://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl-3.0.html
(2) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affero_General_Public_License
(3) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain-specific_language