21.05, Monday 3 Feb 2003

This first bit is Matt Jones, in email: "'News' story as wiki - the world in wiki now, with connected rolling blogs by reporters and reading linked to the story node which show you the historical view as it builds".

The problem being, the world as wiki would be so large we'd have storage problems, problems over how to find things, problems about what's important in the long and short terms. Abstraction problems, data model problems. You might as well use thing-itself to represent the thing! It would be easier. You'd end up with a second Earth, a model of the Earth, that we could look at and examine, and a whole army of bloggers, journalists, etc, to filter the news/information etc stored on the WikiEarth.

But then with versioning and so on and so forth, the WikiEarth would be regenerated at every second, duplicated and recorded, so there'd be a chain of planets stretching outwards from the Sun, firstly the real Earth, then WikiEarth, then WikiEarth2, WikiEarth3, WikiEarth4, all representing the state of the planet at version-snapshot time periods into the past.

And on the latest planet would live the wiki gardeners, attempting to make some kind of sense out of this infinite chain of historical earths, but they themselves would be reflected in history and would stare at themselves, an infinite recursion.

So we'd need an ur-wiki to collapse this, a single planet on which all of history and all of space is represented at every single point, where the latest version snapshot overwrites all others but at the same time includes them, where every change is itself an encoding of the global memory. Where the density of ghosts doesn't obscure the now, but can be filtered by the current snapshot and self-corrected by re-evaluation of history, at every time; where the ur-wiki is also the map of the ur-wiki (there would be several such maps, as many as there could be), is also the map of the ur-wiki map, is also the map of the map of the map of the ur-wiki -- this ur{ur-wiki} all in a single planet, at a single, constantly updating now. Heated by the sun, I think, with grass, and blue sky with clouds, and cities, and in those cities, people living.