How We Wiki

OGM's documented practice of how to wiki, distilled from Admin and Help/How We Wiki/ (5 files) and Admin and Help/How We Wiki/Our Way of Writing Here.md.

This is the most developed self-documentation area of the source wiki — a rare case where the editorial practice has been written down rather than merely lived.

Voice and attribution

"We write in third person, and we don't generally attribute text to any one person.

Sometimes, we need to write from a single individual's point of view; generally, if you really need to, use a self-pronoun like 'my', but add your name in parentheses after, or name yourself in third person (and then someone else might add 'and Their Name'). (Pete thinks principle is a good idea.) (It's based on my (Pete) experience with Socialtext and other wikis.)"

The wiki's default register is third-person collective. First-person is allowed but tagged. The page demonstrates the convention by using it: parenthetical author tags inside the description of the convention itself.

The four wiki concepts

Admin and Help/How We Wiki/Our Way of Writing Here.md names four primary concepts:

Chunking — breaking information into pieces of appropriate size
Naming — finding and referring to a piece of modular content
Linking — file empty in source, but the practice is described in Our Way of Writing Here
Incipient Links — links to pages that don't yet exist

The first three are conventional wiki vocabulary; the fourth is distinctive.

Chunking

"Chunking is when you take undifferentiated information and turn it into chunks. You do this when you decide what is going to be on one page, what is going to be on another page, when you put things under a header, change the header level, make a bullet list."

"A whole document without differentiation is not in the best structure for a wiki format. A knowledge design decision about the rough shape of the network."

Naming

"Naming is a way of finding and referring to a piece of Modular Content."

"As a team, we want to converge towards the similar names for similar concepts. This helps us continue to merge and chunk the Modular Content into a shared language."

Incipient Links — the distinctive move

From Admin and Help/How We Wiki/Incipient Link.md (~84 chars): "An Incipient Link is a link to a page that doesn't exist yet."

Elaborated in Admin and Help/How We Wiki/Our Way of Writing Here.md:

"Incipient Links - links to things that don't exist yet... are just as important as a page. You can make them, without stopping your train of thought, and they will be there as placeholders.

Obsidian knows a link that doesn't exist is still a link.

If you click on the Incipient Link, then the page exists."

This is the editorial stance that produces both the strength and the visible weakness of the source wiki: writers don't pause to fill in stubs, they point and keep moving. The result is that the wiki has many True Orphans (linked-to-but-missing) and Orphan Gems (linked-to-but-thin) pages — and that the act of writing isn't gated on the act of building infrastructure.

(The discovery layer in this wiki — Discovery/ — exists because of this editorial choice. With every "I'll fill it in later" the source accumulates a soft signal about what was wanted, even when the want wasn't fulfilled.)

Markdown conventions

Bullets: - rather than *
Italic: _underscore_; bold: **asterisk**
Blank line between different element types (header → list, etc.)
First line of each page: # {Filename} as H1
Filenames: capitalize, use spaces, no FS-forbidden chars (Massive Wiki convention)

Page maturity

Admin and Help/How We Wiki/Our Way of Writing Here.md proposes a tree life-cycle for page maturity:

"Pete has used tree life cycle names, with a page describing each: seed, sprout, seedling, sapling, adult, elderly, snag or rotting log."

Not in active use across the source. Mentioned as a "how do we want to signal page maturity?" question, not a settled convention.

Hashtags

#hashtag style is mentioned but underused in practice. A few pages use them (#onboarding, #faq, #starting-with-OGM in OGM Culture/OGM Onboarding 101.md) but it's not systematic.

What this means for navigating ogm-wiki

A reader walking the source needs to know:

Outline pages are common. Many pages are heading-only or bullet-only, awaiting elaboration. They aren't broken; they're seeds.
Links to nowhere are common and intentional. Every "Incipient Link" is a marker that someone wanted that page to exist.
Voice mostly third-person. When you see first-person, look for the (parenthetical author) tag.
Folders matter. The 26 top-level folders are the primary navigation; the Meeting Index uses Dataview, which doesn't render in static HTML.

This wiki — ogm-wiki-wiki — is a deliberate alternative navigation surface that doesn't depend on Dataview.

Knowledge Architecture — the broader frame
Orphan Gems — outcomes of the Incipient-Links practice
True Orphans — incipient links that never landed
Details About This Wiki — how this wiki handles attribution and voice differently

Sources: