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Start a Massive Wiki - how-to

A Massive Wiki supports the sharing of versions of files in Markdown format. Markdown, Shared, Versioned, Files led to an acronym, MaSVF, that is pronounced like the word "Massive". So writing shared, versioned, Markdown files makes it "Massive";-- what makes it a "Wiki" is creating links to other pages while you write your thoughts in this one, a wiki property referred to as Link As You Think. A Massive Wiki is a collection of files in markdown format that contain links to each other and to other resources both local and on the internet.

Establishing and using a Massive Wiki starts with answering a few questions.

First: what software apps are used to write and edit Markdown Files? One app that supports Markdown and inter-file linking is Obsidian. There are other well-supported apps for creating wiki-linked notes, such as Logseq. Plain text editors such as Emacs, Vim, Notepad, (more??) can be used but wiki-linking is often left without support from the app.

  • TODO: clarify this list and include links

Second: how are wiki files shared and versioned? One way to do this is to use a Git-based system, such as GIthub, Gitlab, or Codeberg. Our current primary wiki practice uses Github. Git services manage the versioning of wiki files well; sharing practices need to be established for each wiki. We have suggestions.

With these two questions answered a Massive Wiki can be created and put into practice. One further question remains.

Third: will this wiki be published to the World-Wide Web? The Massive Wiki team provides a publication method, Massive Wiki Builder (MWB), that renders the content of the wiki as a static web site. For a Github wiki repository, MWB publishing can be enabled by Github, or by another hosting service such as Netlify.