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Show HN: Encycla – like GitHub for knowledge (encycla.com)

44 points by philipn ↗ HN
Hi HN! There's been lots of note-taking / personal knowledge tools developed in the past few years. But there's a big difference between working with people you already know and collaborating with anyone on the internet.

Right now, if you're interested in, say DIY air purifiers[1], you could throw up a document or webpage. But there's no good way for people you don't already know to work on it, to make it their own. If you're writing software, the answer is obvious: publish a Git repository on GitHub/GitLab.

With Encycla, we're building a sort of "GitHub for knowledge": a place where you can create simple, topical webpages that others can fork and asynchronously push & pull changes from (without knowing about Git or anything technical).

On the backend, every page on Encycla is a git repository containing Markdown that you can clone, edit independently of the Encycla website, push to other services (such as GitHub, GitLab), etc.

For instance, here's a page on Encycla:

https://encycla.com/KF94

and the underlying git repository pushed to GitHub:

https://github.com/philipn/KF94

1. https://encycla.com/Corsi-Rosenthal_Cube

10 comments

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emmo
Like.. a wiki?
only4here
It's basically like Wikipedia but it uses Git. I made a couple articles to test out the editing and it's pretty good so far.
ktpsns
I love the concept of incorporating git and wiki. I frequently catch myself of implementing some git managament for files in my tools. This is an "inner platform effect", since git is part of my software development platform. But it's a good part! :-)
theowenyoung
I like this concept. Why don’t you just use README.md as the content? Then a lot of awesome list can easily be imported to Encycla.
meowtimemania
Really like this idea. Did you leverage any open source tools to host/manage all the git repos? What tools did you use to build the backend/frontend?
sysOpOpPERAND
this is great, i was thinking about making a history chain where historians can help seed and propagate content, complete with an profile for each user and their stats, a breakdown of how their stats came to be.

kind of like a baseball card for each historian where people can explore who vouched for who.

there can even be forks where people disagree on what happened, that way the user can follow the evidence, refute it or comment on it for other users to see, kind of like how wikipedia does it but for comments.

that way we can make history more persistent than current archive methods.

but anyways, great work! always good to see educational projects being built, my parents bought a pc for the family, we were homeschooled and a lot of my education (outside of textbooks) came from cd/floppy disk encyclopedias and other educational software

20after4
For similar ability with an existing wiki you can use something like https://github.com/Git-Mediawiki/Git-Mediawiki to access the content of a mediawiki instance using the git client tools.
unqueued
Git-Mediawiki is indeed really cool! I wouldn't say it is that much the same though, and in practice it can be kind of impractical.

It takes a really long time to do an initial clone (sometimes many hours), and because it is still driving git, if the clone fails, it fails. Even after the initial clone, fetches can take quite a long time and there are many bugs.

I use it myself for archiving mediawikis.

Encycla seems much more git-first, which is also awesome.

denysvitali
Is the backend opensource? If not, why?

I could totally see this as an alternative to say, Confluence