Wiki has been established: https://wiki.near.org

I would like to launch a Wiki for NEAR Ecosystem and hope to gather support from community to fill it in and help maintain going forward.

Reason

Currently there are some info on the https://near.org page but it’s naturally limited and updated slowly as it’s designed to attract attention and route people. Future rebrand is going to just make that more clear but not going to create more place for content. Website is also maintained by the Foundation and has limited capacity for maintenance of some content that is changing.

At the same time https://docs.near.org became very developer focused. There are clear things that developer wants to see from the start, but all the general info / token related / validator related info was pushed out (some of it still there, but harder to find).

There is also no place linked directly where to learn about community, Guilds (what are they, how to start one, etc). There is no place that would collect various information sources from the ecosystem (like nearweek.com, neardaily, medium, etc).

Wiki

The idea is to have a place where a person can learn from basics about NEAR, it’s mission and vision; learn strengths of the protocol and see how it compares to other potentially familiar chains; learn about ecosystem (guilds).

For more technical reader, there will be deep dives into specific details how accounts are structured, how sharding works and other.

At the same time for more non technical, there will be more information about guilds, how to start one, where to find references and more.

As we are finalizing governance, standards and Treasury DAO - having those items described in a tutorial like fashion is also important.

It would be important to have “router” places that would be informing where various info lives.

A good version is an old version of Polkadot Wiki (currently it became too overloaded): Polkadot · Polkadot Wiki

Ask

Would be great to have commitment from teams and guilds to contribute the initial content but even more important to continue improving and contributing to it over time.

Comment here with your commitments and what are pieces of content you would like to see or can write.

Well said and detailed. Wikis are one of the first places I look for information due to the efforts and work that go into creating and maintaining one. That’s why it would be interesting to see one being created. I did look look for NEAR wiki when I first got here. Good to see it is finally being brought up.

PS: I’m not an all-star contribute but I can make some OSS contributions (contributed to Aeternity wiki in github the early days).

I would support NEAR Wiki, would be happy to contribute and point people to it.
We indeed are missing “one place for everything NEAR ecosystem”.

Love the idea! It is clearly needed to help support the ecosystem as it grows and could be a good value proposition for NEAR. Not many chains have a comprehensive wiki (I would say Portal for more marketing flair). I would love to help and even lead the charge. I’ve been thinking much about this lately and have documented the needs/pain points the community is experiencing through growth.

The MarCom team is producing good content for playbooks, we can contribute with a good portion of that content. Let’s build our Wiki!!

Thank you for the NEAR WEEK mention @illia ! I agree, the ecosystem is missing an overview which is easy to navigate in - especially for the first-comers / non-technical. Crypto has a reputation of being complex and hard to understand, however I believe it is a communicative and UX/UI challenge that can be solved by initiatives like a NEAR Wiki. I am certain it could greatly benefit the ecosystem and help achieve more users and faster adaptation.

NEAR WEEK is very open to collaboration and would love to engage on this.

This is a good idea. We have a lot of Near information, but it’s scratted in different place and not easy to make reference. In additional, sometime we want to read about Near in an overral context, or linking, comparing between Near’s technology with other cryptos, other sharing technologies. With Near wiki, the translation for different language would be easier, and by that way, more people can know and understand about Near

Newcomers are finding it difficult to find all the information needed to get involved. I think that a section dedicated to opportunities that NEAR offers for learning and getting involved would be very much appreciated (e.g. content on guilds, NEAR Academy etc…). Perhaps it would also be useful to complement the section on NEAR’s objectives with perspectives that are more outward-looking and that stress more the concrete social issues that NEAR tries to tackle. The 4NTs guild has already quite some content on that and can certainly contribute.

Love the idea! As for the software, I try to follow this kind of apps (don’t know why)

It’s seems that choice is quite limited:

• wiki.js
• MediaWiki

As for the content, I believe docs.near.org became greater compared with a year ago. IMO our docs is very similar to wiki (despite that it’s not so easy to contribute there from the UI). Agree that docs are too development related. It might be because it called “docs”.

I would like to see everything we have in docs in new wiki + all other info like economy, guilds, ecosystem and all other with possibility to go deeper in specific area.

khorolets:

It’s seems that choice is quite limited:

• wiki.js
• MediaWiki

Yeah, I agree. We were planning on installing a wiki instance for collecting community resources- the why, what, how of guilds, how to contribute to NEAR etc. and had asked @chefsale to help us with a mediawiki installation. But then we decided to go with Gitbook for the playbook’s that we’re producing, just because the UI seemed to better and it was easy enough to get it set up. FWIW, Gitbook also seems to have all the primary needs of a wiki- collaborative, has timestamps & is SEO friendly. One thing that a gitbook doesn’t have would be the “Discussions” tab for each page. We thought that discussions around specific topics could take place on the forum instead.

But if the wiki needs to be a wiki, we can port over the contents from the gitbook.

I agree with Gitbook as an option. The key will be the information architecture to ensure we have a good model similar to the gov.near.org.

I could however see some a customized design to ensure the overall UX is similar to other NEAR assets.

Integration into the wallet/explorer would be another great feature as these are the major entry points into the ecosystem.

Created a quick poll for the platform: https://twitter.com/ilblackdragon/status/1414626912681476107

Please respond there if you have suggestions for the platform.

wiki.js https://twitter.com/SashaBaksht/status/1414919045539848192

Other alternatives:

mdBook - mdBook Documentation - static pages with edits through github, so it might be a bit involved (we already use it for the nomicon)

https://www.bookstackapp.com/ - PHP-based fully-featured wiki engine

Thanks everyone who participated in the vote (https://twitter.com/ilblackdragon/status/1414626912681476107) it came out pretty much equal.
Did some more research and thanks to @blaze for digging through Gitbook settings.

Here is my scoring based on your input:

• Gitbook: good layout/UI, good search, a bit complex contribution flow (either via github or need to become writer first), but editing itself is WYSIWYG which is a big plus for non engineer contributors. Interestingly there is a custom SSO support, which if NEAR wallet supports can be added. Github provides a rich interface to discuss the contributions and issues but they are not visible in Gitbooks.
• wiki.js: can do sign up via NEAR and allow anyone to contribute, layout and search are meh. Editing is Markdown (with viewer). It’s open source and self hosted, which means it’s possible to customize more. There are discussions on the page.
• mdBook: meh UI, only github contribution.

Generally, Open Source solution is preferred but at this point speed of deployment and ease of collaboration is important. Also familiar layout for people is important as well.

I suggest we go with Gitbook at this point and fund a development of a Dapp that uses NEAR and one of the storage protocols to create an Open Source and Web3 Wiki platform with WYSIWYG capability, contribution tokens, editors DAO and more exciting Web3 capabilities.

Illia thanks for taking the time to interact with the community here and on Twitter. It’s a hard decision to choose a platform.

Love the idea of creating a Wiki dApp based on NEAR. This would be a fantastic asset and showcase of “dogfooding” - we eat our own dog food. lol

On a separate but related topic of SSO. Having the foresight to open an issue with the Wallet team for Oauth3 and SAML integration was great! Consider adding OAuth / SAML · Issue #1926 · near/near-wallet · GitHub

These SSO options via the NEAR Wallet will help extend NEAR’s reach.

Sample of proposal for NEAR Wiki.

Hope a fancy day ya’ll are having NEAR cuties.

Got a healthy idea that i want to bring to NEAR commune which other crypto networks have:
NEAR Wiki – Full encyclopedia about NEAR Project.

Website concept is the same as in any wiki website format – users can create pages with posts, other users can correct them and fulfill with updates.

Why NEAR needs it?

1. Imagine knowledgebase where whole info about NEAR blockchain, De-Fi, Guilds, DAO’s, products, NFT projects, partners, collaborations, hackathons, achievements, events, Paras, Mintbase and all FAQs that you can think of can be seen in one place. A perfect chance for newcomers and infohunters to obtain content grail and remove some of copy/paste work from admins and commune welcomers.

2. International orientation. Since english is not the only language we speak here and for some users it tough all the content that NEAR has, can be translated and understood in regions. An additional chance for national guilds to interact together giving their members opportunity to create and translate content in exchange receiving some coins.

3. Picture of how HUGE is NEAR Protocol for media journalists, investors, talented people who consider joining NEAR community, product developers and creators. In general no need to google out every medium blog related to NEAR with a chance to miss something that could be important for individual. I see it as an additional marketing tool that can work as a sponge sucking in people attention and giving a warm hug to search engine AI optimizing and increasing “mentions” to increase rankings and authority.

4. Unobvious reaches - indeep introduction with NEAR protocol. I’ve been working in translation and content creation in other crypto networks what results i saw from aside:

• When you write or translate your learning process is much higher when if you read text, or watch video or join a meetup. Knowledge remains in your head.
• Convert authors and translators into active community members. I joined some projects because of translation opportunity cuz it’s an easy task, tho trough getting familiar with project after looked for other opportunities. So it simply allows community user from “just to hang out” convert to “i got ideas, how i can realize them here” user level.
• Strength the local communities for common task. Bring together people from your speaking language to assist with content writing and translations, later on you might see yourself as local community leader.

What needs to be done before launching it on Sandbox?
TBD:
Content Plan +100 topics for articles collected form NEAR ecosystem.
/Can take it on myself. Worksheets are amazing to create construction./

Website structure (categories and languages).
/Simple, collect languages from existing communes and add additional when asked./

Design logo and brand look of NEAR Wiki
/We need a designer/

Develop (or use existing) backend and frontend of website and maintain it.
/In search of developer, help needed/

Later on an admin to hold work with coordinating content authors, translators and check if articles are not simply Gtransladed.
/Content admin also to be found/

Rates of payment for content creators and translators for adding articles to Wiki.

Sample to discuss:

Rates ar for 300 words (A4 page).
Simple: Just written text
Medium: Text with added contextual pictures
Hard: Text with pictures and tables, or content for developers including coding samples.

Content writing: S 10 NEAR / M 12 NEAR / H 15 NEAR

Contents translation: S 6 NEAR / M 8 NEAR / H 10 NEAR

Content adding (already created posts from guilds, news media, etc.) S 2 NEAR / M 3 NEAR / H 4 NEAR

Content editing (fixing mistakes and visual structure): 4 NEAR

Let me know if rates look fair.

Have seen that as an engine most of you voted for Github. Adding my NEAR coin for discussion:
Since i’ve worked for another crypto commune on Wiki creation at a peak it got +100 content creators, translaors and editors and aprox 5 admins for quality of work. So enterprise level +400 USD for subscription might apply.
They use mediawiki.org engine for it. Cuz it’s simple. With it can be few issues on path when adding multiple languages, still can be solved and it’s easier to manage. For users it’s also easy to edit and add new posts cuz has same WYSIWYG.
Maybe from visual perspective won’t be so cool.
Also as a bonus big G loves it, cuz it’s realy light for SEO purposes.

Will ask web developers from our side how familiar they are with Github.

So yeah! To start it just need web developer. At beggining could manage all processes. From Latvian NEAR Guild we got already one admin who could coordinate workflow with content creators and another girl is 50/50 for now.

Update here: https://wiki.near.org is live but still very early.

Information design is still in progress, but if you want to contribute:

• To get writer access, respond here with types of content you want to write and I’ll DM you writer access to gitbooks.
• Or contribute via Github UI: GitHub - near/wiki: NEAR Wiki

Hope we can grow this quickly into powerful resources of NEAR’s information.

Hey Illia,

Can I get access to the Gitbooks, please?

I’d like to expand on the following:

• Setting up your NEAR Wallet
• Acquiring NEAR
• Interacting with your first NEAR dApp
• The NEAR Community

Cheers

Fantastic. Formally requesting writer access for myself. I added the Wiki link to the Homepage and added a bit of info about contributing and linked in the Contributing page.

Suggested information architecture and next steps…

Goal: Give people who are curious to dive deep about various aspects of NEAR a “plain English” (or insert your preferred language!) explanation of all the topics of interest and routing to deeper sources (eg the development docs, guild homepages, funding flows, etc) where needed.

Likely users: They will likely have multiple levels of engagement and interest. The Wiki should provide them at least to a mid-level of understanding (“knowing what they don’t know”) before sending them on to deeper resources or humans/communities for more.

• The generally curious: including potential community members, tokenholders, partners, founders, developers, teammates… pretty much anyone who just heard about NEAR
• The action-oriented: these are each of those categories but where now they’re actually trying to see if NEAR can be used to accomplish their goals. This is about building good mental models, providing comparisons and then a call to action to go deeper.

Major topic areas of interest:

• Tokens – information about the tokens, where to find them, how they work, etc. Information about how to follow markets, participate in defi, move tokens across the bridge, etc.
• Funding – information about how to get funding, whether that’s micro grants for hackathon projects or connecting to large funding sources for more established projects. Grants, DAOs, funds… with calls to action for both prospective funding seekers as well as funders (like VCs who want in on deal flow or DAOs looking to advertise that they’re open for business).
• Engagement and contribution – where are the places to actually talk to people in the community about various topics? Open calls, chat channels, etc. How to contribute and join the community.
• Mental models and taxonomies – how to understand the overall ecosystem, the technology and the the community that stitches it all together. This is up at the highest level (what’s the difference between company X and foundation Y anyway? what is NEAR best for? etC) down to the more specific (who are all the people building in the ecosystem today? How successful are DApps on NEAR right now?)
• Product – what kinds of products can actually be built with the NEAR tech, which ones are actually being built, and how can someone identify and apply recipes for creating great products?
• Growth and marketing – what resources are available to help projects as they grow, including product-oriented growth (eg using embedded incentives in NFTs to create viral marketing loops) and more community-driven growth (eg activating the community behind a project).
• Comparisons – understanding how NEAR compares to other projects out there, from the technology level up to what you can actually do with it to build amazing products.

TBH this may be a good place to build out the Open Web Atlas information too as it incubates and prior to it launching as its own website. Just like docs are meant to specifically serve the needs of someone wanting to develop on NEAR, OWA serves the project founder who wants to engage in building a web3 project. This wiki may be more NEAR-oriented than OWA will be, but lots of good overlap and shipping > perfection.

Information sourcing
Lots of NF teams have this info in Notion right now and just need to make it public such that each team effectively has a homepage and orientation area here plus publish the info relevant related to their area. For example, the Ecosystem Success team will publish the menus of Funding, Development, Operations and other resources here, which are meant to solve problems for someone who wants to eg get their project funded or build it or turn it into a company.

My ask
Who could potentially provide the product ownership and project management for this? We can certainly sort out a bounty or grant stipend to subsidize the effort. That would involve architecting the information, coordinating with @jake to put a consistent design on it, manage PRs for new content, and generally sherpa-ing people through contributing to it in a way which keeps things clear and concise.
@Zhunda I saw your proposal and @blaze you mentioned you’d be interested. We also have a senior content person at NF who will be able to collaborate with this when he begins. If you’re in, please DM me to dig deeper.

I just posted something that hopefully ties the bigger picture together for all these information sources: Information Journeys and Builder Pathways: How the Website, Wiki, Docs, Open Web Atlas and Community OS fit together

Do we have something in place for localising this when it gets a little more fleshed out?

Goal: Make the NEAR Wiki accessible to everyone by translating it to all major languages (and beyond!)

(Proposed) Solution A bounty system to incentivise the NEAR community to translate it to their local language.

This has worked well with other projects in the past, it’s how ethereum.org translate their content. However, it might be beneficial that, after community translations have been submitted, they’re reviewed by a professional translation service (at a cost).

The ethereum.org team use Crowdin for their contributions to translations. Here’s their specific Crowdin page if people want to take a look.

Would love to hear any other solutions, too!

Gitbooks has localization embedded. I would expect we start localization when we have initial content populated.

Using professional service to proof read both English and other languages is a great idea.

Awesome! We already have a plenty of FAQ articles in Russian

Yes! I see this as an important next step for the ecosystem. I would be happy to take the lead on the product management side (Roadmap, IA, Design, UX) as well as coordination and sourcing. If there were someone that could be the primary PM that would be great. It would also be nice to have some hours available from @amgando as he has key user feedback on many parts of the ecosystem and is actively working through some use cases for the Explorer.

I call it a portal instead of a wiki as it should be a landing for the ecosystem where you would get News, Events, and How / Where to Engage. Here is a list of gaps and pain points I have documented as voiced by the community. My hope is that that between the Wallet and Wiki they could be addressed.

News

• Roadmaps
• New launches
• New grants
• Events

How to:

• Become a developer
• Become a validator
• Lead a guild
• Become a contributor

Questions/Comments:

– Community

• How can I get involved?

• Where do I find people with my interests?

• I have not been able to find my place.

  – Ecosystem

• What’s the state of NEAR?

• Where is the roadmap?

• What projects are launching?

• What apps are live on NEAR?

  –Guilds

• What is a guild?

• Where can I find guilds?

  – Tokenenomics & Token

• What are the tokenomics?

• Where can I buy NEAR?

• How can I earn with NEAR?

– Support

• Where do I get support for X?
• I can’t get the support I need.
• No one responds to my questions.

As part of the process of launching the Wiki (Portal) I recommend we create a guild of Community BUIDLers this guild would be responsible for helping ensure the Wiki stays updated and relevant by working across communication lines throughout the ecosystem.

Hey @illia - I would like to request writer access to be able to add what the MarCom team has been working on so far as part of Community OS:

• Guilds Playbook
• Open Web Contributor Playbook
• Linkdrop Guide
• information on the NEAR TipBot on Telegram
• information on SputnikDAO and Astro

Would definitely love to combine these materials with the broader NEAR Wiki, in addition to the other playbooks we’re set to publish in Q3.

@blaze - a Community BUIDLers Guild would be fantastic to ensure the Wiki has evergreen and up-to-date content, and this is definitely an accurate accounting of the gaps and pain points as I understand them as well.
Between wallet, wiki, upcoming dashboard(s), and the composite tools in the Community OS toolkit, and the other information sources @erik.near captured in his recent Forum post, hopefully we will clarify and accurately present all the ways in which the community can build and be engaged with NEAR and one another!

Content ideas and concept in whole looks great @blaze

Stepped extra mile and asked developers and Kinu from Semilla Labs how much resoucers might be needed for that kind of Wiki.

I see that it has an opportunity to connect with other crypto wallets. So mine idea of whole concept looks like this in addition for average wiki type website where people can create articles, others can make translations to other languages, and some can edit these posts for additional info.
How possible and how hard it is to add a chance for people to create accounts using their NEAR wallet (or at least add them to their users profile).
When they create a post, or make a translation there should be shown a calculator counting symbols and increasing it to coifficient of coins in NEAR to be paid for such a work.
Additionally admin accounts that can views their articles, put comments (for remarks if something in content should be changed) and after to make an approval when everything is ok.
Such user panel from users side can peek on all articles that were created and bounties, admins can see all articles and if they approved article in the moment from treasury DAO (or using smart-contracts) so that article author gets funds on their wallet.

If you think that such a type of Wiki website would solve most of administrative issues and be decentralized at same time. Can go further.

Great idea! I believe the long-term goal is for NEAR to create a Wiki product that would encapsulate what you have mentioned. There was previously a portal with rewards, but that function was transitioned to the individual guilds. This sounds like a fantastic idea for a grant!

Hey everyone, I put together a working Information Architecture (IA) doc. I would appreciate collaboration and help to begin the process of getting things populated. Thanks @mecsbecs for already giving the first round of feedback!

docs.google.com/document/d/1yjZIVSHvJz6C2Hwz3crM9uq46un0vnIeWFLLta5puzs/edit?usp=sharing

@illia @erik.near @Grace - do we have a NEAR team member such as @amgando that can help collaborate on this?

Once we have a direction settled it would be good to tweet about the new guild forming as well as posting in Discord and Telegram to find recruits.

Blaze, looks fantastic. Like the way you put ideas on paper.

Let me know at what steps can assist you. Can help with testing, management, project promo and get on some article writers and bunch of translators.

@blaze ! This is chef’s kiss

Really great stuff. I’d love to jump on a call sometime soon and run through this if you’re available some time?

I’m keen to collaborate on this and support you throughout the entire process.

Another thing I’d like to consider, particularly when it comes to the NEAR Wiki, is the duplication of content. There’s no use in writing something fresh when the NEAR Community have already nailed it. It boils down to bringing things together and getting them collated.

Hello,

I wrote an article recently on introduction to NEAR, also built a NEAR dice Dapp. Here’s a link

I’d like to contribute to NEAR wiki as a technical writer

David agreed! I see this starting out primarily as a curation process that brings the greatness of the NEARVerse together in one spot for folks new to the ecosystem. There will however be new content creation as well. One thought is to have this portal spin-off into more of a wiki format at the different levels. So we incorporate both existing docs and newly generated wiki content.

How we handle the inclusion of internationalization at the different levels may be something to deep dive into.

Yes, I am available for a call! Shall we recruit a few more folks to join us? I can setup a Discord or Telegram if that is the best way for folks to join the conversation.

Fantastic! Yes, let’s find a direction on a channel to connect and get moving!!

Absolutely, 1,000%

More the merrier I say. Would be great to align on the goals of everything, too.

I’ll drop you a DM with my Discord and Telegram handle. Let’s kick things off!

@blaze I’ll be looking to my colleague @David_NEAR to hear how I can support (especially from a Community playbooks perspective) and thanks to both of you - and anyone else who joins - for leading the way for this!

A funding request has been submitted to the community fund!

Community BUIDLers Guild - NEARVerse Portal (aka Wiki) Guilds

TLDR of the proposal: The Community Buidlers guild is a new guild that will focus on creating and curating information throughout the NEARVerse to keep the new portal relevant and updated. The NEARVerse Portal servers the needs of the overall community to provide both a landing zone and launch pad to learn, engage and grow with the NEAR community. The guild members will be comprised of curators, writers, editors, translators, and liaisons to the NEAR core team. Purpose To curate, create, and …

It’s time to CURATE the NEARVerse!

Hi Illia,

That’s an amazing idea.
I’m a Community Moderator, I’m currently working on a list with the most frequent asked questions within our community, would love to have the permission to create the official FAQ Page on or Github.

Also, I’m planning to add our various workflows and tips for new and current moderators.

Stan - Near CM

We’re getting things moving…

Anyone interested please feel free to join the Telegram group: https://t.me/joinchat/vyWiIs1oG6c1NzQ8

Hey @illia,

Is internationalization automatically enabled in Gitbooks? If not, can we get that switched on, please?

Not sure if I have the permissions to do this atm.

We should be able to add variants for French, Spanish, Chinese (simplified) and Japanese.

I believe it’s possible to support more languages ‘out the box’ with language files, too.

Although this won’t match the same standard as actual translation, it’d be good to see since it’s getting more fleshed out now

Great idea. Cheers to the team.

illia:

The idea is to have a place where a person can learn from basics about NEAR, it’s mission and vision; learn strengths of the protocol and see how it compares to other potentially familiar chains; learn about ecosystem (guilds).

Great idea @illia and looking forward to contribute to the Wiki very soon.

Hey Kemal,

Awesome to hear you’d like to chip in.

See the latest update here:

NEAR Wiki: Content Plan Development

Hey @simeon4real, Thank you for getting on board! Appreciate all the work you do around here!