Wiki Without the Pedia
Libraries without Librarians
The word wiki comes from the Hawaiian wikiwiki, meaning “quick” or “fast.” Ward Cunningham borrowed it in 1995 to name his collaborative software because pages could be edited quickly, by anyone, at any time. Speed was the point as was ease of contribution. A wiki is a mechanism—a publishing surface, not a knowledge system.
Pedia adds dimension to the concept of a wiki. Derived from the ancient Greek paideia (παιδεία), pedia as a concept encompasses education, instruction and the rearing of a child into full civic and intellectual life. Most familiar as the root of the word encyclopedia, which means “instruction in the complete circle of knowledge.” The enkyklios is the circle; the paideia is the education it contains. An encyclopedia hold facts and structures them to contextualize facts while also teaching how facts relate to one another.
So when organizations proudly announce “we have a wiki!”—what they have is something fast and collaborative and almost entirely uneducated. They have a very quick pile rather than a knowledge infrastructure.
The organizational wiki is one of the great monuments to good intentions and structural negligence. Everyone can edit it. Almost no one does. Somewhere in there lives a page called “Onboarding” last touched in 2017, still referencing the old benefits portal, the discontinued VPN client, and a team that was reorganized during the pandemic. It has 4,200 views—all of them new hires, all of them confused. Since it has the most views, it continues to dominate search results for all time, and gather more views, compounding. Unless someone clicks delete. They never do.
There is also a page that says “see Bob.” Bob left in 2019. The link 404s.
What the wiki cannot do is teach. It cannot tell you how concepts relate to each other, which terms mean the same thing, which documents supersede which, or why the thing called “Customer Profile” in Sales is the same thing called “Account Record” in Ops and “Client Entity” in the data warehouse and “that thing” in every meeting. The wiki will hold all four pages. It will not tell you they’re the same page.
That requires paideia, which relies upon structure, controlled vocabularies and relationships between defined concepts. Caring to hire experts to look at what the organization knows and make deliberate decisions about how it should be organized, retrieved and understood by the collective whole.
On repeat, organizations will budget for the platform, choosing tools positioned to solve the knowledge problem. Confluence, SharePoint, Notion and Guru are common solutions—all tools that enable quick. The pedia part — the information architecture, the taxonomy, the ontology, the metadata schema, the governance model — is cut because it sounds expensive, is hard to understand and doesn’t demo well.
“We just need somewhere to put things” is the wiki mindset. It becomes the junk drawer mindset of the org and in some cases, the attic as well. Its the “I’ll deal with it later” behavior that ensures you will be in this exact meeting three years from now, asking why nobody can find anything.
The Greeks understood that paideia was the highest civic investment—that knowledge cannot be decoupled from learning and education. The paideia strategy is not “it’s in there somewhere, good luck.” Knowledge management is like building curriculum and organizing the circle—through which we teach people how to know things, not just how to locate them.
Modern organizations have decided the circle is optional, in favor of the quick. They’ll call it a knowledge base because the knowledge is in there, somewhere. Meanwhile, the base remains an expensive theory, unworthy of investment.
Put simply, the wiki is the room and the pedia is the library. Most organizations have built the room and chose not to invite a librarian. Many don’t even have a single organizational glossary of their own internal terminologies—a simple dictionary.
While most organizations struggle with knowledge, they fail to see that knowledge management is sorely missing, chronically refusing to fund the pedia. The virtuous circle breaks down then—the continual practice, education and learning that sits within knowledge infrastructures. Organizations need someone to look at what the organization knows, decide how it should be organized, determine what relationships exist between concepts, establish a vocabularies and build something a person can learn from. They need information and knowledge architectures. They need Librarians.
Expertise in how humans encode, retrieve and reason from knowledge and that expertise is not free or always fast enough to compete with the speed of automation. Yet, nervously AI automating everything is only apparent speed—it will not solve for the knowledge voids.
And somehow, the face of organizational knowledge challenge—the wiki—has come to be known as knowledge management. While the knowledge is there, its management—what makes it useful— remains theoretical, delayed for another quarter with the hope that future AI advances will solve for the knowledge problem.
The wiki is the room. The pedia is the library. Most organizations built the room and decided not to invite a librarian.
More from Intentional Arrangement
Process Knowledge Management, Part I
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about me. I’m a Semantic Engineer, Information Architect, and knowledge infrastructure strategist dedicated to building information systems. With more than 25 years of experience in enterprise architecture, e-commerce content systems, digital libraries, and knowledge management, I specialize in transforming fragmented information into coherent, machine-readable knowledge systems.
I am the founder of the Ontology Pipeline™, a structured framework for building semantic knowledge infrastructures from first principles. The Ontology Pipeline™ emphasizes progressive context-building: moving from controlled vocabularies to taxonomies, thesauri, ontologies, and ultimately fully realized knowledge graphs.
Professionally, I have led semantic architecture initiatives at organizations including Adobe, where I architected an RDF-based knowledge graph to support Adobe’s Digital Experience ecosystem, and Amazon, where I worked in information architecture and taxonomy. I am also the founder of Contextually LLC, providing consulting and coaching services in ontology modelling, NLP integration, knowledge graphs and knowledge infrastructure design.
I am also a curriculum designer, teacher and founder of The Knowledge Graph Academy, a cohort-based educational program designed to train and up skill future semantic engineers and ontologists. The Academy is the the perfect balance of ontology and knowledge graph theory and practice, preparing graduates to confidently work as ontologist and semantic engineers.
An educator and thought leader, I publish regularly on my Substack newsletter, Intentional Arrangement, where my writing frequently explores the relationship between semantic systems and AI.
That’s a very thoughtful piece on this whole viral wiki movement. As someone who’s tried it out over the past two weeks (I built an implementation of the Karpathy idea into my personal notes and tasks app https://usevist.dev), I am finding that because I’m adding sources and ingesting them with the help of Claude in a conversational form, I’m doing more with the knowledge than just storing it - very unlike dropping a pdf or a link into Evernote or Notion like I would have done in the past.
Now there’s a discussion with Claude, I get a summary and some hints from Claude on how this relates to or might be applied in other things I’ve worked on recently.
I am looking forward to seeing how it holds up once there’s hundreds of entries in the wiki, but for now I’m optimistic about its usefulness.
Tech options has compounded this by giving people "not only" more places to store files but also "seemingly unlimited" storage.