SkyrienWiki

SkyrienWiki is an experiment that I started in July 12th, 2015. The primary goal of this wiki is to provide a flat repository for my thoughts and writings. My secondary goal is to learn to manage MediaWiki and the infrastructure requirements that come with scale. This system is currently hosted in a shared instance LAMP server managed by DreamHost.

Background

Throughout life, I've accumulated a vast array of knowledge and information scattered in various locations (papers, apps, memories, textbooks, articles, internet tidbits, etc...), and found it often difficult to recall the exact item when I needed it. Thanks to the digital era, much of my mind has been "outsourced" to media such as OneNote, Evernote, MindMeister, and other tools, but ultimately, these were internal, transient representations of my thoughts, certainly helpful for my own needs, but I wanted to make it more useful and expansive.

We know now that immense good can come from the internet and open-source culture, so, with high hopes for "something interesting", on July 10th, 2015, I started Skyrien Wiki, as a personal epistemological experiment. I've never self-hosted a wiki before (Sharepoint, yes; self-hosted MediaWiki, no), so I figured it's time to. But alas, with so much great information in the world, what can I offer here? This being the internet, I think it's time to experiment.

This is not meant to compete with any general knowledge wiki, such as Wikipedia, which represents some of the best of what the internet can be, but rather, it's a personal wiki, a playground of ideas. I imagine, it will consist of content of my own ideas and writing.

Perhaps in the future, editing will be made public... when the internet proves ready...

Logo

This is internal version 3 of the SkyrienWiki logo. Roboto was chosen as the base font for its clean and elegant lines, being simple yet not boring and importantly, because it is supported by the open-source community and is royalty-free.

Google's font description states:

"Roboto has a dual nature. It has a mechanical skeleton and the forms are largely geometric. At the same time, the font features friendly and open curves. While some grotesks distort their letter forms to force a rigid rhythm, Roboto doesn’t compromise, allowing letters to be settled into their natural width. This makes for a more natural reading rhythm more commonly found in humanist and serif types."

The font is Roboto Black for the X, and Roboto standard for the S. The letters can be seen to represent several connotations. The most obvious and intentional one is that of "Xander Skyrien", but a number of different connotations are possible.

Design goals were to have a simple logo that was clearly visible in a variety of frame sizes (including the beloved favicon), and hint at depth and speed. The background can evoke the sense of a blank canvas, reinforced by the brush-stroke pattern outlining the rounded rectangle.

A neutral three-tone palette was chosen to complement the MediaWiki skin and allows for a variety of different thematic renditions in the future. The specific swatches are chosen to be highly visible and web-safe: Blue - #3FA9F5 Black - #333333 Light Gray-white Fill - #F2F2F2

Content

I planned to start the wiki in a very top-down approach, creating categories based on what I plan to post and then posting articles. However, I've realized that a Wiki (and the internet as a whole) has a much more interesting hidden hierarchy based on inbound/outbound links, which creates a natural flow of ideas and content. So, I'm changing my strategy to make an attempt to start new pages off of old ones, traversing and expanding the graph as I do so, but in a much more bottom-up way. Ultimately, the richest atomic entity in a wiki is the "article", so this will allow a focus on complete articles.

Style

My blog has gone through much evolution over the years decades, and I expect it to continue to do so. I typically employ a first-person narrative, present/past-tense, descriptive prose with a good dose of internet culture.

Future Content

I've been brainstorming various purposes for a personal wiki, but haven't yet decided on what content to start with. I want to start an open 3d printed content repository site, to counter the censorship imposed by existing entities today. Perhaps MediaWiki would be a viable platform for that.